
Copyright N° 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE 

LIGHT OF FAITH 



A Defence, in Brief, of Fundamental 
Christian Truths. 



By FRANK McGLOIN, 

M 

AUTHOR OX NORODOM, KING OE CAMBODIA ; 
THE CONQUEST OF EUROPE, ETC. 



ST. LOUIS, MO. 1905. 
Published by B. HERDER. 

17 South Broadway, 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 


Two Cooies Received 


DEC 29 1905 


Copyright Entry 
CLASS Ol. XXc. No. 

/ 3 dr£ 3 A 

COPY B. 



e^* 10 ' 



NIHIIy OBSTAT. 
Sti L,udovici, die 19. Jan. 1905. 

F. G. Hoi/weck, 

Censor theologicus. 

IMPRIMATUR. 
Sti Ludovici, die 20. Jan. 1905. 

►J* Joannes J. Gi^knnon, 

Archiepiscopus Sti I*udovici. 



Copyright 1905, by Joseph Gummersbach. 



Becktold Printing and Book Mfg. Co., St. Louis, Mo. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE. 

Preface . . . 5 

First Lecture— The Being of Grod . . 11 

Second Lecture — The Mystery of Life . 62 

Third Lecture — Belief and Unbelief. . 120 

Fourth Lecture — Revelation .... 165 

Fifth Lecture— Man and the Ape . . 218 

Sixth Lecture — The Mind and the 

Brain 252 

Seventh Lecture — The Argument from 

Design 259 

Eighth Lecture— Man or Butterfly? . 268 

Ninth Lecture — Spencer and the Future 

Life 277 

Finale . . 284 






PREFACE. 

This volume is made up in larger part of 
lectures, delivered upon various occasions, 
and this fact accounts for some few repeti- 
tions of thought, which may be found in its 
pages. The correspondence printed below 
explains the origin of the three which first 
appear. The book deals with problems, 
from the solution of which no man can 
escape, and which the truly rational should 
study carefully and make their best effort 
to master in this life. Time, as compared 
with eternity, is nothing; and, if we interest 
ourselves so deeply in the passing concerns 
of this existence, why should we be regard- 
less, as so many are, of the eternity that 
lies before us? 

No sane man can afford to be indifferent 
as to the existence of Grod, or as to the true 
nature of man and of his duties towards his 
Creator and towards his fellow-men. We 
are living now, as unnumbered human 
beings have lived before us; and like our 
predecessors all, we too must die. And 
after we are laid away in the grave, the 
centuries shall roll their courses over the 

(5) 



b THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

dust which was ours. And if we be im- 
mortal, of what little consequence will it be 
to us, during the eternal future, what, in 
human estimation, we were or were not 
while on this earth : and how deep and un- 
ending must be our concern in the verdict 
that Grod shall have passed upon our souls, 
as they stood before His eternal judgment 
seat. 

To all who recognize the gravity of the 
situation for themselves, as well as for 
others, in the light of the possibility, even 
conceding it to be no more, of a future and 
eternal life ; to all who are seeking honestly 
to ascertain the truth in this vital regard, 
this volume is addressed by one who has 
thought much, whether well or not, upon 
these profound and necessary questions. 
It is the writer's earnest hope that, what 
has been here written may aid somewhat 
in strengthening the faith of some who are 
at times tempted to doubt ; and may be of 
assistance also to others, not yet actual be- 
lievers but seeking light, towards enabling 
them to attain that happy condition of cer- 
tain faith and absolute trust, which is one 
of the choicest blessings of God to men . 



PREFACE. 7 

Sundry Citizens of Various Denominations to 
Judge Frank McGloin. 

New Orleans, March 23, 1892. 
Hon. Frank McGloin, New Orleans. 

Dear Sir: — The undersigned, belonging 
to various Christian Denominations, con- 
sidering the frequent attacks in public prints 
and elsewhere upon Christian Truth, and 
knowing you to be informed upon these 
grave issues and capable of presenting them 
from our Christian standpoint, join in re- 
questing you to deliver, at times and places 
to be fixed by yourself, a course of say three 
public lectures, upon such cardinal and 
generally accepted Christian Truths as you 
may select. The proceeds, if any above 
expenses, you might apply to such charitable 
purpose as may seem to you best. 
Geo. W. Young, Girault Farrar, 

Geo. Thomson, F. L. Richardson, 

Jas. David Coleman, W. S. Parkerson, 
John T. Sawyer, B. F. Choate, 

J. Zach. Spearing, Sam. L. Gilmore, 
F. A. Monroe, W. H. Byrnes, 

A. G. Winterhalder, M. A. Alleyn, 
Hubert Murray, W. P. Nicholls, 



8 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

E. Howard McCaleb, J. A. Crebbin, 

Ghas. S. Rice, Geo. S. Brown, 

W. B. Lancaster, Henry B. Kelly, 

John T. Whitaker, Fred. D. King, 

James A. Gresham, Frank N. Butler, 

David Zable, Thos. G. W. Ellis, 

Thos. Sefton, W. O. Hart, 

H. W. Spear, H. E. Upton, 

C. Doyle, B. E. Forman, 

Thos. Gr. Rapier, H. C. Cage, 

Jos. M. Rice, Carleton Hunt, 

James Timony, John Henderson, Jr. 



Response of Judge Frank McGloin. 

New Orleans, March 26, 1892. 
Messrs. Greo. W. Young, David Zable, and 
others. 

Grentlemen : — Your flattering request to 
me to deliver three lectures upon Funda- 
mental Christian Truths is highly appre- 
ciated, and with pleasure complied with. 

The place of delivery will be Grunewald 
Hall, and the dates and subjects as follows: 

First Lecture: Tuesday, May 3rd, 1892, 
8 p. M. — Grod: Can we know Him? Must 
we know Him? Yfhat evidence have we of 
His existence? 



PREFACE, 9 

Second Lecture: Thursday, May 5th, 
1892, 8 p. M.— The Mastery of Life: Life 
Physical and Life Spiritual; Mortal and 
Immortal. 

Third Lecture : Tuesday, May 10th, 1892, 
8 p. m. — Belief and Unbelief: Which is 
Light and which Darkness ! Which en- 
nobles Human Nature, which degrades it? 
Which is our Hope, which our Despair? 

With highest regards and best wishes, 
I remain, gentlemen, 

Your obedient servant, 

FEANK McGLOIN. 



FIRST LECTURE. 

THE BEING OF GOD. 

God : Can we know Him ; must we know Him ; 
what proofs have we that He is ? 

1. The Christian Truth, which we have 
chosen for this evening's consideration, is 
the very corner-stone itself of revealed Re- 
ligion. Q-od: Can we know him; Must we 
know him ; What are the evidences of His 
Existence? The first and third of our ques- 
tions must be dealt with and answered to- 
gether ; for we can surely know the Deity, 
if that Deity has submitted to us evidences 
sufficient to demonstrate His Being. 

2. Humankind is made up of very many 
races and nations, aggregating, perhaps, 
fifteen hundred millions of individuals. 

^ Among this vast multitude are to be found 
many degrees of intelligence ; from the rude 
savage, living in his cave, to the cultured 
citizen of some highly civilized common- 
wealth. If the Supreme Being is to be 

(ii) 



12 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

known to all mankind, the unlettered bar- 
barian is an element to be considered as 
well as the most profound of philosophers, 
or the most erudite of scientists. 

3. The true question therefore, is: has 
Glod submitted evidences of His own Being, 
calculated to convince every human mind, 
however elevated its capacities, or however 
lowly? 

4. Considering the average human in- 
telligence, it becomes manifest that evi- 
dence, to make itself intelligible to the mass 
of mankind, must address itself primarily 
and principally to the senses. It must be 
such as can be seen and felt and heard. 

5. The great St. Paul, the inspired 
Apostle of the nations, has put the case with 
utmost exactness, in his Epistle to the 
Romans, Chap. I, verse 20: "For the in- 
visible things of Him, from the creation of 
the world, are clearly seen, being understood 
by the things that are made ; His Eternal 
Power also and Divinity; so they are in- 
excusable. ?? 

6. Our senses unveil to us the works of 
Creation, and from the observation and 
study of them, natural reason is capable of 



THE BEING OF GOD. 13 

deducing the assurance of the existence of 
Grod and His Creatorship. Revelation, 
therefore, as to this, merely confirms and 
amplifies what Nature teaches. It is for 
this reason that the great Apostle declares 
it so utterly inexcusable to refuse recognition 
and confession of these most evident truths. 

7. The dogma of the Deity, as Chris- 
tianity formulates it, is that there exists a 
Divine Being, Eternal, Omnipotent, All- 
wise, Perfect ; Who has created the universe 
out of nothing, and is the Supreme Lord 
and Master of all. * 

8. Unbelief, in so far as, absolutely or to 
all practical purposes, it antagonizes this 
fundamental teaching of Christian Faith, 
is of many shades. Within the compass of 
a discourse such as this, it is not necessary 
to enter deeply into details with regard to 
the differences prevailing among infidels 
themselves. For present purposes, dis- 
believers may be divided into three general 
classes: one designated by some as Deists 
and by others as Theists, another styling 
themselves Agnostics, and finally absolute 
Atheists. 

9. The Deist is he who admits in a gen. 



14 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

eral way the existence of Grod, but denies 
Revelation. The Agnostic pretends that 
all of these matters are beyond the limits of 
possible human knowledge. The Atheist 
denies directly and bluntly the Being 
of God. 

10. From the standpoint of Christian 
Faith, there is little difference between the 
three. Deist, Agnostic and Atheist. The 
concession of the first is theoretical merely, 
and not practical. Claiming to confess Grod, 
the Deist yet refuses to listen to His voice^ 
speaking to us through a special revelation, 
and declines to recognize His work in the 
holy Church He has established.^ What 
would be thought of the child who, while 
pretending in a vague and general fashion 
to concede the existence of its father and 
mother, yet refuses to hear the commands 
of either, or in any way to recognize their 
authority? Of what avail would be mere 
professions of loyalty, emanating from one 
who obstinately repudiates the laws his sov- 
ereign has established, and refuses submis- 
sion to the governors and the magistrates 
whom that sovereign has commissioned? 

11. Herbert Spencer, and all the rank 



THE BEING OF GOD. 15 

and file of Agnostics, claim that they neither 
deny the existence of Gk>d, nor concede it. 
The doctrine they announce is, that these 
matters are simply "unknowable". This 
position, some assert, is a medium between 
that occupied by Believers on the one hand, 
and the one held by Atheists on the other. 
The fact of it is, that there is no real dis- 
tinction between the contention that Grod is 
"unknowable" and the absolute denial of 
Divine existence. Practically, the Agnostic 
and the Atheist stand together; they are 
united in the war against the Christian 
Dogma of the Supreme Being, and the same 
line of argument serves equally the purposes 
of both. 

12. What Agnostics mean by their fav- 
orite expression "unknowable", when used 
in this connection, is that we can know 
nothing one way or the other about a Divine 
Being. Certainly, we Christians admit that 
it is not possible for the finite intelligence 
of man to fathom the infinite depths of the 
Divine Nature; but this does not legiti- 
mately remit the Deity into the category of 
things ■ 'unknowable" . Have we not around 
us the works of the Deity; and, just as we 



16 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

judge of the earthly workman by the results 
of his skill and labor, are we not enabled to 
form a sufficient idea of the Divine Creator 
from the evidences He has given us of His 
creative power? It might as well be objected 
to the astronomer, that the heavens are un- 
knowable, because there are depths of space 
beyond the reach of his most powerful tel- 
escopes. It might as well be said to the 
geologist, that this earth is unknowable, 
because his researches cannot reach to the 
fiery center of the orb upon which we live. 1 
Or, let us charge the sailor with knowing 
nothing of the sea upon which he sails, for 
the reason that he is ignorant of many mys- 
teries which lie hidden in its profoundest 
depths. If things must be classed as un- 
knowable, because simply they cannot be 
thoroughly and completely known, then 
nothing is knowable, for our science fails to 
reveal to us the essence, or eventual nature 
of anything. > 
~* 13. The visible universe constitutes the 

1 The theory of the earth's having a fiery centre has 
been much questioned. Its opponents say that the 
heavenly bodies behave as if they were solid ; that the 
greatest heat is about 50 miles below the surf ace ; that 
this heat is due to the play of electricity, etc. 



THE BEING OF GOD. 17 

primary and principal evidence of the being 
of Grod /"evidence appealing to the senses in 
the first instance, and falling within the 
comprehension of all having senses to be 
impressed. More, however, is requisite 
than mere sensual impression. A strong 
reasoning faculty is needed, operating with, 
or upon sensual impressions ; and the rea- 
soning power among all visible creatures is 
found alone in man. The brutes have sen- 
ses, as a rule keener than those of men, 
and, like men, they receive sensual impres- 
sion of earth and sun and stars ; but, never- 
theless, for them the book of Nature is the 
same as sealed. The role which human in- 
telligence must fill in this process, is to 
observe well and consider deeply the Uni- 
verse which is about us ; and from that ob- 
servation and consideration to arrive at a 
just conception as to the First Cause of all 
that is. 

14. The law of causation has been much 
discussed ; but whether the human mind is 
impelled to it by instinct or intuition, as a 
something of commanding necessity, or 
whether the universal recognition of the law 
be the result of the accumulated experience 
2 



18 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

of all mankind, can be of no serious con- 
sequence in our present discussion. The 
fact remains that this law, whether as the 
result of intuition or of long experience, 
meets, practically at least, with universal 
recognition. 1 Except as to a first or original 
cause, the ; human mind rebels against the 
idea of any effect without a proportionate 
cause. ^ That things do not make them- 
selves, commends itself as an axiom to the 
most ordinary intelligence. So, by the 
greatness or littleness of the effect, or result, 
men estimate the greatness or littleness of 
the operating cause. > A gentle zephyr may 
stir the leaf upon the stem ; but nothing less 
than a cyclone will uproot the sturdy oak. ^ 
The swallow may build its nest under the 
eaves ; but it could never conceive or erect 
the glorious cathedral of Saint Peter's at 
Borne .j>^ 

1 "Thus the notion of causality — the assumption 
that natural things did not come of themselves, but had 
unseen antecedence — lay at the root even of the sav- 
age's interpretation of nature. Out of this bias of the 
human mind to seek for the antecedents of phenomena 
all science has sprung." Tyndall, lectures on Light, 
lecture 1, page 4. See also Tyndall's "Forms of 
Water", page 1. 

2 Atheists suggest that, if the law of causation 
necessarily calls for a Creator of the visible Universe, 



THE BEING OF GOD. 19 

15. The first step, therefore, in our pres- 
ent deliberation, must be to consider care- 
it should be pushed further and demand a Creator, or 
cause, for that Creator, and so on, endlessly. The 
answer to this is simple. We can deal with the law of 
causation only as our human experience makes the 
same known to us. That experience indicates, or car- 
ries up to a single Creator, and no more. The works 
of creation are everywhere those of one and the same 
Supreme Being: a condition, the existence whereof is 
demonstrated by the fact, for example, that so many 
substances, of which earth is composed, the spectro- 
scope shows to be components, likewise, of the most 
distant orbs; and by the further facts that all the visible 
universe is moved and affected by the same forces, and 
is controlled by the same natural laws. One and the 
same Supreme Master has tied, as it were, by gravita- 
tion this earth of ours to the giant Arcturus, and Arc- 
turus to this earth. We have, therefore, every reason 
for the conviction that He is the Alpha and Omega. 
At all events, He is the only Alpha and Omega of which 
we have any indication, whatsoever. 

Nor would it affect the present argument, were 
conditions otherwise. The Supreme Being, whom we 
know by His works, has created us, and He it is who 
preserves us and cares for us. To Him, therefore, do 
we owe, above all, our recognition, love and obedience. 
His claim to our adoration could be in no wise dimin- 
ished by even the suspicion, were it admissible, that 
beyond and above our God may be other Gods, greater, 
if possible, than He, but still strangers to this universe : 
their very existence hidden from us. If we owe to the 
only disclosed Creator obedience and love, there arises 
at once the call for religion, which is merely this 
supreme duty reduced to system. 



20 THK LIGHT OF FAITH. 

fully the Universe, as it lies outspread before 
us. Eegarding it as an effect, the more 
fully we appreciate its grandeur and its 
immensity, the higher the conception we 
must form of the greatness of its Author. 

16. To form a full idea of creation, in 
all its immensity, is totally beyond the reach 
of our powers. In the first place, creation, 
as a whole, cannot be brought within the 
scope of our observation ; and, in the second, 
such a portion of it as stands at least par- 
tially revealed, is so vast as to defy our 
powers of conception. Scientists may weigh 
the earth and the moon and the sun and 
the stars ; they may measure approximate- 
ly the enormous inter-stellar distances, and 
give us results mathematically expressed in 
long lines of figures. But all of this does 
not enable us to form adequate conceptions 
of weights and distances, mounting for ex- 
pression to the octillions and even higher. 

17. We may, perhaps, be more successful 
in impressing ourselves with the immensities 
of the universe, by approaching them, as it 
were, gradually and systematically. With 
this earth, which is the abiding place of our 
race, we ought to be somewhat familiar. 



THE BEING OF GOD. 21 

It serves us all as our home during time ; 
from it we obtain the food which sustains 
our life, and materials with which to make 
garments to cover us. It lies outstretched 
before us, every portion of its expanse, as it 
were, in actual contact with our senses. 
The truth is, however, that even among the 
intelligent the vast majority are little im- 
pressed with its tremendous proportions, or 
with the wonderful forces by which it is 
controlled. f 

^ 18. Even were this planet of ours a soli- 
tary orb, fixed or speeding through space, 
it alone should furnish us convincing testi- 
mony of the existence, as also of the Omni- 
potence and Infinite Wisdom of the Divine 
Creator. Most educated persons can answer 
at once that the earth's circumference is 
nearly twenty-five thousand miles : but how 
many are there who really consider what 
these figures import?^ Does it strike them 
that an express train, traveling fifty miles 
an hour, would require more than twenty 
days to make the entire circuit?^ Do they 
estimate the weight of this enormous orb ; 
a weight in tons requiring twenty-two figures 
to mathematically express it — : six sextillions? 



22 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

A bulk so stupendous that not all the en- 
gines and machinery in the world combined , 
supposing it might be brought to bear, could 
move it as much as one hair's breadth.*- 
Nevertheless/ this enormous mass, in the 
mighty grasp of Nature, proves less than a 
feather's weight. One sleepless force rotates 
it completely around its axis in the brief 
space of a single day. So rapid, at the 
equator, is the movement thus communi- 
cated, that the citizens of the city of Quito 
are being swung around at the wonderful 
speed of exceeding one thousand miles in 
every hour. 

19. More astonishing still, did we but 
consider it, should be the earth's flight along 
its orbit around the sunr* The mean distance 
between ourselves and the great luminary 
of our planetary system is about ninety-three 
millions of miles, making the length of 
earth's orbit nearly six hundred millions oW 
miles: and this enormous journey is accom- 
plished in three hundred and sixty-five days 
and some hours. The meaning of this is, 
that we all of us, standing or sitting here 
this evening, are speeding through space at 
the amazing velocity of say eighteen miles 
in every second of time. 



THE BEING OF GOD. 23 

20. But, however great as is this world 
of ours, it appears colossal only w T hen 
brought into comparison with the works of 
man. There are a multitude of other 
spheres in space, beside which it sinks into 
absolute insignificance. The sun, for in- 
stance, which lights and warms this earth, 
has a diameter of eight hundred and sixty- 
six thousand miles, Vr about one hundred 
and eight times greater than that of earthy 
Were the sun a mere shell, the earth might 
be placed at its centre, and with it the moon ; 
and, in that event, though our satellite be 
at a distance of two hundred and thirty- 
nine thousand miles from us, it might con-' 
tinue its revolution and leave yet between 
its orbit and the solar shell a space of one 
hundred and ninety thousand miles. 

21. In volume, the sun is one million 
three hundred thousand times larger than 
the earth; though, being less dense, its 
weight is only N three hundred and thirty 
thousand times greater. ^Twenty-eight fig- 
ures are required to express that weight in 
tons — one octillion, nine hundred and 
odd septillions of miles. That vast orb 
is one fiery body, enveloped in an at- 



24 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

mosphere of substances volatized by intense 
heat. It is the centre of our planetary sys- 
tem , and holds all the spheres belonging to 
it in their proper places by its powerful 
attraction. It floods circumjacent space to 
an immense distance with light and heat, 
radiating from every part of its surface; 
and if we reflect that our earth probably re- 
ceives only the one billionth part of this 
light and heat, we can form some faint con- 
ception of their volume and intensity. 

22. Tremendous as the glorious orb of 
day must appear to us in the light of these 
facts, it rises not even to the dignity of a 
speck, in comparison with the immensity of 
space in which it is poised^-space stretching 
away to distances which our imagination 
cannot possibly take in, and which, so far 
as our powers of apprehension are concerned, 
is illimitable, v 

23. The depths of space are not a mere 
void; they are interspersed with myriad 
stars, of which some six thousand are visible 
to the naked eye. Optical instruments bring 
into view a vast number of others, and 
powerful glasses reveal to us many millions. 
The application of photography to astro- 



THE BEING OF GOD, 25 

noniical observation still further augments 
the number of observable stars ; and there 
is good reason to suppose that every new 
increase of man's facilities for exploring the 
depths of space will reveal to his gaze still 
other hosts of shining orbs that people 
it. As the human mind is incapable of 
imagining any limits circumscribing space, 
so is it equally incapable of conceiving a 
figure beyond which the multiplication of 
the stars becomes an impossibility. 

24. What are these seeming points of 
twinkling light which we call stars? In all 
probability, each and every one of them is 
a sun, like our own, with possibly its own 
planetary system. Enormous as are the 
proportions of our own luminary, they 
dwindle into insignificance when compared 
with those of some of the more distant suns, 
whose dimensions have been approximated. 
The North Star, the old and faithful friend 
of mariners, is a hundred times more lumi- 
nous. Vega, in the constellation of the 
Lyre, pours forth two thousand times as 
much light; and magnificent Arcturus is 
equal to six thousand such suns as ours. 
Nor have we any justification for asserting 



26 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

that even with Arcturus the limit of solar 
immensity is attained. In the depths of 
space there may be other orbs, exceeding in 
size and splendor Arcturus itself , as greatly 
as that giant of the heavens, on its part, 
surpasses our sun. 

25. But in order to enlarge our impres- 
sion as to the vastness of the material uni- 
verse, let us consider more specifically the 
immensities of distance involved. Upon 
earth we can measure by miles the width of 
oceans and the length and breadth of con- 
tinents. This same standard of measure- 
ment will serve us in the expression of dis- 
tance between our earth and the moon, or 
between our earth and the more distant sun. 
But, when we plunge into the farther depth, 
so vast become the respective distances, 
that as a unit of measurement, the mile 
becomes utterly unavailable. Alpha Cen- 
tauri, considered the nearest of the fixed 
stars, is estimated by David Gill, Royal 
Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, to 
be fully twenty-five and a half trillions of 
miles away. Vega some place at one hun- 
dred and fifty-eight trillions of miles. How 
could multiplications, divisions, etc., be 



THE BEING OF GOD. 27 

managed, were factors unwieldy as these 
employed? 

2&T- 4 Light travels through space at the 
astounding rate of over one hundred and 
eighty-six thousand miles per second, v In 
the space of one single year, it traverses the 
distance of five trillions, eight hundred and 
seventy-five billions of miles. This enor- 
mous span is designated a light year, and it 
has been made to serve as the unit for the 
calculation of inter-stellar spaces. 

27. Swift as the passage of light is show n 
to be, a ray from the nearest of the fixed 
stars consumes three and a half years at 
least and probably four and a half in reach- 
ing us. About from forty-five to fifty years 
of travel is required for the light from the 
Polar Star to reach our earth; hence, were 
that well known star blotted from existence, 
not far from half a century might elapse 
before any indication of the catastrophy 
would reach our earth. 1 

1 "It is certainly not too much to say that some of 
the fainter stars revealed by the great Rosse telescope 
lie at distances so enormous, that their light has taken 
more than a hundred thousand years in reaching us. 
Then beyond these stars lie millions and millions yet 
farther away. There is no limit to the range of space 
occupied thus with the work of God's hands." 

(Proctor, Expanse of Heaven, p. 202.) 



28 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

28. We call these stupendous globes 
fixed stars, because to our natural and un- 
aided observation they seem stationary. 
As a matter of fact, they are far from sta- 
tionary; they are, on the contrary, each of 
them rushing through space at an enormous 
speed. The great Arcturus, for instance, 
chief of all the known starry host, six 
thousand times larger than our sun, nine 
hundred and fifty trillions of miles away, is 
being hurled along at the rate of say two 
hundred thousand miles an hour, or about 
three times as rapidly as earth is flying 
along its orbit. 

29. We have considered the immensity 
of space, an immensity which practically 
may be held as boundless. We have taken 
mental note of the stupendous orbs, which, 
in countless myriads, are scattered at enor- 
mous intervals throughout the expanse. 
On clear nights, we can catch the light 
emanating from many of the distant stars, 
from Arcturus, for instance, so many light 
years away. This means that light, and 
with it heat, is traversing these awful gulfs 
in steady streams. How does it effect the 
wondrous passage? What is the roadway 



THE BEING OF GOD. 29 

which serves it for these journeys? Accord- 
ing to the theory generally accepted by 
scientists, the medium serving this purpose 
is the ether; a subtle substance, more ten- 
uous far than any known gas, and con- 
sequently removed entirely without the 
sphere of direct human observation. 

30. What bearing has this theory of 
all-pervading ether upon our present dis- 
cussion? It tends to verify the old adage 
that nature abhors a vacuum. It is to the 
effect that not one solitary point, however 
minute, in all the boundless abyss of space, 
is void of created substance. It demon- 
strates creative work in every spot through- 
out all of this vast Universe. 

31. It is a matter of little consequence 
to our discussion whether this theory of a 
universally diffused ether be accepted or 
rejected; let it be considered that light and 
heat are material, and, consequently, that 
what impresses our senses are minute and 
luminous particles, or corpuscles, from the 
incandescent bodies. In this latter view, 
space remains filled in every point with 
created substance, that substance being 
light-atoms in the place of the ether. 



30 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

32. More mysterious still : while the light 
waves are speeding through the ether, the 
force of gravitation, reaching out in some 
way through the interstellar spaces in every 
direction, binds with the mighty yet invis- 
ible chains of mutual attraction the myriad 
spheres into one grand general system, 
however far apart they may be, and however 
disconnected they may appear. 

33 . Thus far we have been contemplating 
the immense in nature's order. Here we 
might rest, depending upon the law of 
causation to warrant the conclusion that an 
Omnipotent Creator can be the only con- 
ceivable, adequate First Cause for works so 
stupendous, so innumerable and complex. 
But, let us further fortify our premises, 
before drawing the final conclusion. 

34. In that interview between Richard 
Coeur de Lion and Saladin, so graphically 
described by Scotland's famous novelist, 
the former displayed his incomparable 
strength by severing a bar of iron with one 
blow of his good sword. Saladin, unable to 
rival such a feat, could, however, exhibit 
an exceeding degree of skill and dexterity, 
by shearing in two, with his keen-edged 



THE BEING OF GOD. 31 

scimitar, a delicate silken fabric. If, in 
such a case, the force of Richard's blow was 
to be wondered at, no less wonderful was 
the delicate skill displayed by the Saracen. 
35. Astronomy, sweeping the heavens 
with the telescope, reveals to us the hosts 
of gigantic spheres that people space. 
Microscopy is not less wonderful. Turning 
our attention to an opposite direction, it 
lays open to our observation phenomena 
which are most marvellous. A single drop 
of water taken from the ditch may, under 
the lens, present to us a very world of life 
and motion, made up of thousands of living 
beings, vegetable and animal, of varied 
shapes and sizes. 1 All of those tiny creat- 
ures, living in that drop of stagnant water, 
like the animals and vegetables of larger 
growth, are born, grow and propagate their 
species: and, doubtless, the progenitors of 
many of these varieties of minute living 
beings were contemporaneous with those 
gigantic beasts and reptiles, long ago ex- 

3 "One writer tells us that on the area of a single 
square inch we could place a population of common 
germs, or bacteria, one hundred times as great as the 
population of London." 

(Wilson, Glimpses of Nature, ch. 28, p. 84.) 



32 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

tinct, whose fossil remains astonish us now 
by their massiveness. 

36. These microscopic creatures eat and 
digest. As among larger animals, the strong 
prey upon the weak. It seems manifest, 
therefore, that below the living forms the 
microscope brings to view, there are others, 
still more minute, upon which the first sub- 
sist. These latter in their turn live by feed- 
ing upon prey weaker and smaller than 
themselves, and it becomes impossible to 
conjecture what may be the degree of min- 
uteness to which life may descend. 

37. The lesson we are to draw from the 
revelations of telescope and microscope is 
that, whether, in considering the work of 
creation, we attend to the immensity which 
we behold in some of its forms, or to the 
minuteness we observe in others, we find 
everywhere evidences of a Creative Power, 
which is beyond all conceivable limitations 
and restrictions. 

38. While dealing with the minute in 
creation, let us give a moment's attention 
to the very composition of matter itself. 
The original principle of matter is as yet 
involved in mystery ; and, doubtless, it will 



THE BEING OF GOD. 33 

ever remain so, as far at least as mere 
human science is concerned. But as yet it 
seems to be generally conceded that, so far 
as it goes, the atomic theory presents a 
reasonable front. According to this theory, 
matter is eventually constituted of minute 
particles, or atoms, indivisible and aggre- 
gated together, though with spaces or pores 
between. Lord Kevlin has employed three 
different trains of argument to demonstrate 
that these atoms cannot exceed in size the 
one-hundred-and-fifty- millionth of an inch, 
or be less than the one five-billionth of the 
same. If this Atomic Theory be true, then 
each atom is in itself a unit of created sub- 
stance, possessing a distinct individuality. 1 
39. It is to these marvels of Creation 
that the Christian points as the evidences, 
plain, patent, unmistakable, of the existence 

1 The strength of this argument could be in no 
wise weakened by the eventual triumph of the theory 
that matter itself is ultimatly mere varying manifesta- 
tion of original force ; or of the vortex theory; or of the 
electric one. All rival theories, in this connection, 
relate, after all, to the nature of the atom, or the 
ultimate unit, whatever it may be, of that something 
which addresses itself to our consciousness, and which 
we have named, and in all probability shall ever con- 
tinue to name, matter. 
3 



34 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

of a Creator God. When we consider all 
that nature presents to our view, the stu- 
pendous celestial spheres, the minute 
animalcule, the, to us, practical if not 
actual, infinitudes of space and number, the 
far-reaching and all-controlling force of 
gravitation, the swift-flying light, the rest- 
less and ever-shifting constellations — we 
should confess all these things to be the 
workings of a Power not distinguishable 
from Omnipotence itself. The same Power 
which is capable of fashioning the great 
Arcturus, not far from eight billions of 
times larger than our earth, could with equal 
facility create another heavenly body, as 
much exceeding in bulk Arcturus ? self as 
that giant of the heavens surpasses our ter- 
restrial globe. The Power which peopled 
with mighty stars all extended space visible 
to man, with equal ease might similarly 
intersperse a space actually infinite. 

40. Indeed, the unbeliever does not or- 
dinarily join battle with us upon this field. 
Like ourselves, he expresses the greatest 
admiration for the works of nature, and, as 
a rule, he concedes the transcendence of the 
force or forces operating to produce them. 



THE BEING OF GOD. 35 

41. The Agnostic begins by informing 
us that, when we come to the consideration 
of the First Cause of all these marvellous 
manifestations, we enter upon the domain 
of the "unknowable". Nevertheless, he 
seems to know enough about the matter, or 
to think he so knows, to enable him to argue 
with the greatest assurance against the 
Christian dogma of the Existence and 
Creatorship of Grod. The line of his argu- 
ment and that of the Atheist is to the same 
purport exactly, an attempting to account 
for Creation, with the Creator left out. 
One as well as the other combats the idea 
of a Personal Grod. Conceding the pres- 
ence of transcendent energy, the issue is 
joined with us upon the succeeding pro- 
position: that the works of nature manifest 
not only transcendent or unlimited force, 
or power, but also Infinite Intelligence and 
a Supreme Will. This latter our adversaries 
dare not concede, for to do so would be to 
absolutely yield the debate. 

42. So ingrained in the human mind is 
the idea of causation, or, in other words, the 
law of cause and effect, that, without think- 
ing, we are inclined to regard all things as 



36 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

created. But, a little reflection will satisfy 
us that there must be a first or original and 
eternal Cause. Otherwise, we must suppose 
the succession of cause and effect as itself 
extending backward in unbroken line, 
eternally. A is the result of B, and B, in 
its turn, has come from C; and thus on 
from all eternity, unless we concede that at 
some point the First and Eternal Cause 
must be reached. 

43. Here we are upon the actual battle- 
ground. Here, atheism, proclaimed or vir- 
tual, is in its last intrenchment. What is 
the Eternal, First Cause? Is it or is not 
a Grod, Almighty and All- wise? 

44. Practically, two factors are out of 
dispute: Omnipotence and Eternity. In- 
telligent design only remains to be estab- 
lished, and victory is ours. 

45. We must concede the eternity of 
something, if we would escape the alterna- 
tive of admitting that, at some period in the 
far past, there was nothing; and that out 
of that nothing something sprang. Either 
matter or spirit must be eternal; though it 
may not be impossible that both should be 
such. This latter suggestion as to the pos- 



THE BEING OF GOD. 37 

sible eternity of matter is supported by the 
consideration, that, if G-od be eternal and 
omnipotent, there can have been no instant 
during which it was an impossibility for 
Him to create matter. On the other hand, 
it would be destructive of the idea of a 
Divine Omnipotence to imagine Grod as at 
any period under compulsion to create. 
Aristotle taught that the earth, the heavens 
and living beings were without a beginning : 
that they were the eternal effects of an 
eternal, intelligent spiritual Cause; in other 
words, all created eternally by Grod. He 
believed matter to be eternal in substance, 
but not in form. 1 

46. In the past, before science had satis- 
factorily shown the vastness of the Universe, 
and its complexity, atheists satisfied them- 
selves with the one blunt answer to - all of 
these problems — accident, or chance. But 
chance is not a force, or in fact an entity of 
any kind. It can create nothing, neither 
can it bring together things that are apart. 

1 "Natural science teaches," says Haeckel with 
bold assumption, "that matter is eternal and imperish- 
able, for experience has never shown us that even the 
smallest particle of matter has come into existence, or 
passed away." (History of Creation, vol. I, ch. 1, p. 8.) 



38 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

In mere ordinary conversation it may be 
permissible to say that a sequence in deal- 
ing cards, five of the same kind following 
each other in numerical order, is the result 
of chance ; but, could chance ever be sus- 
pected of making the cards themselves, or 
of shuffling the pack and dealing the hands? 
Therefore, merely to utter the word chance, 
is in no way to account for the phenomena 
which we observe. It is mere arbitrary 
closing of the debate. 

47. But, sorry as this response must 
appear to the common sense of mankind, 
it is the only one which, actually, skepticism 
has at its command in the effort to escape 
conceding a Divine plan in Creation. Of 
late years, Evolution has become the favor- 
ite theory of Agnosticism and its twin 
Atheism. If we look closely into the mean- 
ing of that phase of this theory, which seeks 
to exclude design, we cannot fail to perceive 
that chance, in spite of the disrepute into 
which the term has fallen, still holds in it 
the place of a necessary element. 1 So far as 

1 The word "chance", in this connection, means 
a happening without any adequate cause, and without 
design — fortuitously. Now creation must have been 
either designed, or undesigned ; it must have had an 



THE BEING OF GOD. 39 

Evolution is confined to an attempted ex- 
planation of the development or growth of 
the material Universe, it is a mere extension 

adequate creating cause, or no adequate creating cause. 
What, therefore, Agnostics mean by saying that the 
origin of things is unknowable, is and can only be that 
the human mind is incapable of determining between 
these two propositions regarding the source and the 
beginning of the universe. They can, however, logical- 
ly doubt the one proposition only upon the strength of 
the probability of the other. If the theory of design is 
to be held not certain, it must be so because it is not a 
necessary theory : and it can be shown unnecessary 
only by satisfying enquiring minds, that, in the altern- 
ative supposition of mere fortuity, is to be also found a 
possible solution of the great problem. But, if the 
magnitude of results, the complexity and yet harmony 
of operations, the vast extension yet evident unity, 
which Creation manifests, are such as to utterly pre- 
clude for sensible men the idea of chance as sufficient, 
or a reasonable explanation, why do Agnostics still 
permit themselves to recur to chance as even a possi- 
bility, in this regard, and attempt thus to exclude the 
idea of an intelligent cause, operating in pursuance of 
an express design? The only change in the contention 
of unbelievers in this discussion is, therefore, to cease 
advocacy of chance as the positive answer to the great 
question we are considering, and to contend now im- 
pliedly for its sufficiency as a probable solution. And 
the force of the facts and the logic which has routed 
Atheism from its first position, in this connection, is 
no less potent when brought to bear against the one 
upon which it is seeking now, under the mask of a new 
name, Agnosticism, to re-establish its broken lines. 



40 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

or elaboration of the Nebular Hypothesis. 
Hersehel and Kant are credited with hav- 
ing originated it. Laplace, following them, 
adopted and developed it, to such extent as 
to associate his name more particularly with 
it. Herbert Spencer is the one who, per- 
haps more than any other, labored success- 
fully to make it popular among the enemies 
of Revealed Religion. This theory assumes 
that matter existed originally in a nebulous 
condition, devoid of shape or formation of 
any kind; that this nebular or gaseous 
matter was highly heated and self-luminous ; 
that heat as a repellent force, and gravity 
as an attractive one, hauled and pulled at it 
during long ages, until at last it was torn 
into parts and condensed into suns, planets 
and moons, turning each upon its own axis, 
traveling along their respective orbits, and, 
in fact, entering upon all their present con- 
ditions. 

48. This theory of Evolution, in the 
aspect we are now considering it, need not 
necessarily exclude the idea of Grod. Many 
sincere and earnest Christians have accepted 
it, to some extent at least ; maintaining 
that, whether God created the Universe 



THE BEING OF GOD. 41 

immediately as it stands, or as it were in 
germ, with a capacity for full development, 
can make no difference in the value of 
Creation, as evidencing His Divine Exist- 
ence and Power. In the view of these men 
the egg, from which the chicken develops, 
is as wonderful as the full-fledged chicken 
itself. 

49. We need not, therefore, quarrel with 
the Nebular Hypothesis itself, though it be 
based at best upon assumptions rather than 
upon strict proofs. Nor need we show up 
the objections, standing in the way of the 
theory of Evolution, so long as that theory 
confines itself to attempted explanation of 
the order of material creation. 

50. But Atheists and Agnostics reject the 
idea of Divine intervention in the Evolution 
they proclaim. 1 They declare that, in the 

1 To the Agnostic scientist, God is unknowable, yet 
the so-called "forces of nature" are not only knowable, 
but known. It would be ridiculous for him to affirm 
that these "forces" are known otherwise than by the 
action he attributes to them. It is precisely in this 
same way that God is known, through the work of 
creation — by His action. Which then is more con- 
formable to right of reason, to attribute the visible 
creation to a blind, unintelligent force, supposed to be 
an essential characteristic of matter, or necessarily 



J) 



42 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

original nebular substance, or "star dust 
lay potentially all the modifications, or de- 
velopments, subsequent ages have brought 
about. "The world, living and non-living, ? ? 
Professor Haeckel asserts, "is the mere 
result of the mutual interaction of the forces 
possessed by the molecules of which the 
primitive * nebulosity of the Universe was 
composed. ?? "It is no less certain, yf says 
the same authority, "that the existing 
world lay potentially, in the cosmic vapor; 

wedded to it in some way, or to a Personal God, All- 
Wise and All-Powerfnl, having in view an end worthy 
of Himself and most honorable and profitable to His 
rational creatures — the manifestation of His perfec- 
tions to them and their everlasting happiness in the 
possession of His friendship ? 

1 By the word "primitive," or "cosmic, " as here 
employed, Haeckel must mean eternally existent. The 
difficulty of the question for disbelievers in this regard 
is not lessened by pushing it thus farther ahead of 
them. It is by no means a lighter task to account for 
the existence, originally, without a Creator, of this 
"primitive nebulosity," in which lay ' 'potentially" all 
that we now know as this wonderful universe, than to 
similarly account for a first appearance of creation, 
magnificently developed, such as now we have it. It 
is no easier to convince ourselves that the egg came 
by itself into being or that it existed from eternity, 
than to become satisfied that the full grown chicken 
rose from nothing, or that it came to us, practically as 
it is, from eternity. 



THE BEING OF GOD. 43 

and that a sufficient intelligence could, from 
a knowledge of the properties of the mole- 
cules of that vapor, have predicted, say the 
state of the fauna of Great Britain in 1869, 
with as much certainty as one can say what 
will happen to the vapor of the breath in a 
cold winter ? s day." 

51. Is it then seriously propounded to our 
belief, that this wonderful universe, with its 
unending multiplicity of parts, so stupen- 
duous in certain particulars, and so minute 
in others; so inconceivably complex and 
yet so harmonious ; wrought out with such 
delicate perfection of details — are we to 
believe that a piece of mechanism, so won- 
derful as to defy the powers of language to 
adequately describe it, has all developed, 
without design, without any intelligent con- 
trol or guidance of any sort, out of an orig- 
inal, all-pervading gas? Ordinary common 
sense suggests that such a theory makes 
heavier demands upon human faith than 
does the simple Mosaic account of creation. 
Is there anything in all the range of human 
experience to warrant the assumption which 
we are considering, or the bold confidence 
with which it is by some advanced? Bricks 



44 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

and lime, lumber, paints and nails, glass 
and slates might lie together in one heap 
during ten thousand years, without the 
slightest movement among them in the 
direction of arranging themselves into a 
structure of any sort. 

52. But, let us analize. Matter in simple 
form is a primary requisite for atheistic 
Evolution: matter eternal and uncreated. 
But, inert matter could never fashion itself, 
or alter in any way its own state or shape. 
Something must be added, to account for 
development, and that something is force. 
Viewing force as a something indispensably 
distinct from matter, we are compelled to 
the conclusion that, since force could be 
created neither by matter, nor by itself, 
both force and matter must be eternal. 1 
We are progressing, therefore, and find 
ourselves in the presence of two eternals, 

1 Herbert Spencer thought force was the "ultimate 
of ultimates," hence presumably eternal. "Though 
space, time, matter and motion," he says, "are appar- 
ently all necessary data of intelligence, yet a psych- 
ological analysis (here indicated only in rude outline) 
shows us that these are built up of, or abstracted from, 
experiences of force. Matter and motion, as we know 
them, are differently conditioned manifestations of 
force. Space and time, as we know them, are disclosed 



THE BEING OF GOD. 45 

instead of the single one, which is sufficient 
to satisfy us Believers. Now another diffi- 
culty presents itself. What has established 
the relationship between these two eternals, 
matter and force? What has made force 
dominant, and enabled it to set at naught 
the natural inertia of matter? What has 
enabled force to lay hold upon the original 
"star dust" and compel it to assume the 
shapes and qualities it now discloses? What 
can reasonably account for the bringing of 
matter into subjection to force, save the 

along with these different manifestations of force, as 
the conditions under which they are presented. " First 
Prin. Sec. 50. 

A large measure of knowledge this, on the part of 
one of the Apostles of Agnosticism, with regard to 
ultimates. To some of us, not professing Agnosticism, 
it seems that we can have no absolute information, 
concerning physical force, except what comes to us 
from observation and experience, and that we have no 
proofs of the existence of such force totally independ- 
ent of, or disconnected with that which now we know 
as matter. 

It is not easy for me to conceive, for instance, of 
a force, as existent in the depth of space, otherwise ab- 
solutely untenanted, or of currents aud counter cur- 
rents of force, traversing the heavenly vast from star to 
star without the presence of any intervening medium. 
In order to account for the passage of light and heat, 
science felt under compulsion to discover, or invent, a 
pervading ether. 



46 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

theory of foreign intervention, implying 
design and will, and dominion over both? 

53. But, we may be invited to consider 
attraction as naturally inherent in matter. 
This is an assumption never proved. But 
concede it, for the sake of argument: such 
inherence of a particular form of force in 
matter can mean only that matter is in 
some way permanently subjected to such 
form of force. Force is not matter, nor is 
matter force. To declare that the attraction 
of gravitation is naturally inherent in 
matter, is merely to assert that matter and 
one phase or other of force are co-eternal. 
It leaves unsolved the question as to what 
originally united them, if united they be. 
It is no more than an attempted shifting of 
the operation itself from time to eternity. 

54. Again, if the force of attraction be 
inherent in matter, and is co-eternal with 
it; then from all eternity attraction has 
been operating upon matter. It must, in- 
evitably, have been disturbing the u nebul- 
ous vapor" of which Evolutionists speak, 
during all eternity itself. The work to be 
done should logically have been accom- 
plished in what, for greater clearness, we 



THE BEING OF GOD. 47 

may call the eternity of the past. Let 
Evolutionists assign any period they please , 
however remote, as one amply sufficient for 
development to have reached its absolutely 
final stage; nay, let them claim the most 
liberal allowance of time for the attainment 
of the highest perfection to which, accord- 
ing to their view, the universe is destined 
to attain. Let them appoint, say a hundred 
nonnillions of years for the purpose, even a 
period so long as that takes nothing from 
the eternity of the past. Plunge more 
deeply into the abyss, take a hundred non- 
nillions of centuries instead of years, and 
still there remains an undiminished eter- 
nity. How then, Evolutionists, who will 
have no eternal Grod! has it been during the 
unimpaired eternity, which has rolled its 
unbeginning course, before the commence- 
ment of the longest limit you may choose 
to ascribe to the evolutionary process? 

55. But, perhaps the energy of matter 
lay latent during all the preceeding eter- 
nity becoming active in time. In this 
case, if force lay eternally dormant, what 
occurred at last to arouse it? What awoke 
an activity which had lain inactive, during 
the immeasurable stretches of past eternity? 



48 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

56. Heat may be latent in two pieces of 
dry wood, which the savage prepares to rub 
forcibly together, in order to bring forth 
fire ; but could the wood itself ever develop 
the latent heat? Were not the savage and 
his rubbing of the sticks, a necessary inter- 
vention? In the same way, either gravita- 
tion, as an attractive force and heat as a 
repellent one, must have been active from 
eternity, or a subsequent intervention and 
exterior agency must be accounted for. 
And, where and when did that agency come 
into being; did it create itself, or was it the 
third eternal? 

57. Let us now give the ether a moment's 
consideration. The existence of this sub- 
stance, pervading all space, is practically 
conceded by science. It serves as the 
medium for the passage by light and heat 
through the inter-stellar space. Is it mat- 
erial, like the nebular vapor; if so, what 
separated it from the original mass, leaving 
the other components to condense into 
suns, planets and moons, while ether itself 
remained persistently distended? Is it a 
substance distinct from the primordial 
nebula, and independent of the laws, or 



THE BEING OF GOD. 49 

free from the forces governing the latter? 
If so, then how has it come into existence 
and when? Has it been created, or is it yet 
another eternal? 

58. But, conceding the original nebula, 
granting, for the sake of argument, the 
supposed forces at work; what has guided 
these forces in their operations, carried on 
through the ages, towards the accomplish- 
ment of the far-reaching and multiplex 
results, which we behold throughout space? 
Consider the myriad stars, and remember 
them as they are, flaming spheres of stupen- 
dous size ; have blind forces fashioned each 
one of these, and alloted to it a place and a 
course in the heavens? Have mere phys- 
ical laws been able to make a living world 
out of a single drop of water? Have they 
been able to bring forth man, to say nothing 
of the countless varieties of worms, insects, 
reptiles, fishes, birds and beasts, with which 
this earth of ours is swarming? Oh cer- 
tainly! if nebula, attraction and repulsion 
have been capable of doing all these things, 
unaided; then our atheistic friends are 
wrong in not erecting temples to them and 
worshiping them, for they are gods and 
entitled as such to adoration. 

4 



50 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

59. No! Creation shows an original 
plan, wisely conceived, unswervingly ad- 
hered to, and most successfully realized, 
just as certainly as it discloses the operation 
of Omnipotent Power! The myriad suns 
which people space, each possibly with its 
train of planets and satellites, and each 
with a determined place held and main- 
tained for ages, this too, in the midst of 
millions upon millions of opposing attrac- 
tions, exerted upon its every atom, by the 
atoms of every one of the other myriads of 
denizens of starry space; what lesson can 
all these teach us, except that there is, 
throughout space, such a true adjustment, 
or counterbalancing of forces, as to estab- 
lish a perfect and enduring equilibrium? 
Does not this reveal a regulation of bulks 
and densities, and an adjustment of distan- 
ces, with due consideration for each partic- 
ular one of all these innumerable heavenly 
spheres? In the presence of such consider- 
ations, tell us if Infinite Intelligence was 
not needed to establish originally this equi- 
librium over the vastness of the entire uni- 
verse, and to maintain it ever since unim- 
paired? 



THE BEING OF GOD. 51 

60. Coming at once, for the sake of 
brevity, to our own earth ; let us contemplate 
the exquisite adaptation of every thing in 
nature to the needs of man. The great orb 
of day shines in the heavens, giving us 
light and heat, without which we could not 
exist. The moon illumines the night. The 
atmosphere around and above us supplies 
an inexhaustible store of air, which is an 
indispensable need of life. Another essen- 
tial of life, water, is stored up in oceans, 
seas and lakes, vast reservoirs, from which 
it is lifted up, by measured evaporation, to 
the clouds. These, in turn, pour it out 
upon the earth in beneficent rain, cleansing 
the atmosphere and affording moisture to 
the soil, which otherwise would remain 
parched and barren, unable to bring forth 
the products needed for the support of all 
animal life. Rivers and streams of every 
size, penetrating everywhere, upon the sur- 
face of the soil and beneath it, gather up 
the surplus waters, falling from the clouds 
and reconvey them to their reservoirs. The 
annual circuit of our earth about the sun 
gives the seasons, each season with its par- 
ticular service in the bringing forth of 



52 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

crops. The daily revolution about the axis, 
gives day and night in succession, proper 
the one for labor and the other for rest. 
Timber for fuel and for our houses, beasts, 
birds and fishes, to help cloth and feed us; 
coal and mineral oils to burn and illumine 
for us; metals with which to make our 
machinery and implements of every char- 
acter. Was it blind chance which accom- 
plished all of these things for our advan- 
tage ; or blind forces, acting upon senseless 
matter in the form of nebula? Can we, 
without abdicating good judgment and 
sound reason, fail to see in these so many 
and so happy dispositions,^most convincing 
proofs of an Intelligence to plan and a 
Power to execute? * 

1 The simple thread of sewing silk is composed of 
several different filaments, which silk worms have 
spun. L,et us suppose a mass of these filaments, of 
varying colors and shades and larger than our sun, 
intermixed and intertangled at hap hazard ; then let us 
imagine the great, confused accumulation pushed and 
pulled at by attractive and repellant forces. Is it within 
the power of human imagination to conceive that, even 
during an eternity, these contending forces, unguided, 
could remedy the vast confusion, sort out the chaos, 
disentangle and straighten out the countless filaments, 
put them together color by color and shade by shade 
into separate threads ; and, from all, work out, in tex- 



THE BEING OF GOD. 53 

61. How simple, as well as sublime, is 
the Christian idea of the Eternity of Spirit 
— Intelligence and Power combined — 
compared to the notion of the eternity of 
senseless matter and blind force ! How is 
all immediately and readily accounted for, 
when the One, Omnipotent and Eternal 
God is confessed as the Creator of all 
things ! What is there unknowable in this 
glorious truth? It is, in fact, only when we 
abandon this fundamental verity, when we 
turn our eyes away from its clear light, that 
we begin to grope and flounder in darkness 
and confusion? 

62. But this vast Universe reveals more 
of the Deity than simply His Omnipotence 
and Infinite Wisdom. It is in itself a 
direct manifestation of the Unity of Glod. 
As far as the telescope has been able to 
pierce the profundities of space, unity of 
plan has been observed throughout, and 
homogenousness of execution. As the 
range of the telescope has been succes- 
sively extended, the result has been un- 

ture, design and finish, a figured tapestry of dimensions 
proportionate to the enormousness of the original mass 
of tangled material ? 



54 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

changed. The attraction of gravitation is 
shown to be as far-reaching as star-space 
itself: "every particle of matter in the Uni- 
verse attracts every other particle of matter 
with a force directly proportional to its 
quantity of matter and decreasing as the 
square of distance increases." The ether is 
spread through all inter-stellar space, bath- 
ing the surface of every heavenly sphere. 
The spectroscope, which by analysis of the 
light coming to us from the sun, has re- 
vealed so much concerning the latter's 
physical and chemical constitution, has 
conclusively established the presence there- 
in of very many of the substances familiar 
to us upon earth. Similar spectrum anal- 
yses have demonstrated that the stars are 
all suns, like our own, and has moreover 
detected in distant spheres, elements which 
are equally found on this planet. "The 
Heavens announce the glory of Grod." 

63. All of these considerations tend to 
invincibly prove that creation has been 
constructed upon plan, and according to 
one method. From this fact there is but 
a single inference to be drawn, namely, 
that it is the work of one All- Wise, All- 
Powerful Creator. 



THE BEING OF GOD. 55 

64. We may, therefore, from all we 
have been considering, justly conclude that 
the Universe, immense and perfectly or- 
dered as it is, constitutes truly, as Saint Paul 
declares, the visible and unmistakable 
evidence of Grod's existence and of His ab- 
solute supremacy. 

65. It remains only for us now to estab- 
lish the equal verity of the remaining 
declaration of the great Apostle ; that the 
unbeliever is utterly inexcusable in his 
denial of the Being and of the Providence 
of Glod. 

66. Man, unlike the rest of the visible, 
animate creation, is endowed with under- 
standing, amply sufficient, even in its lowest 
degree, to enable him to observe the won- 
ders of nature by which he is surrounded. 
He has reasoning powers sufficient to con- 
sider and compare them and to come to the 
conclusion that they are the works of an 
Omnipotent Creator. 

67. Man, being himself a part of crea- 
tion, God is his Creator. It is a rule of 
natural right, that what anyone manufact- 
ures, by his own exertion and out of material 
belonging to him, the same is absolutely 



56 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

his property. The bare fact, therefore, 
that God made man, establishes at the 
same time the supreme dominion of the 
Almighty over him as one of His creatures, 
and lays him under allegiance. 

68. But this is not all. Not only has God 
created man, but He is his constant Pre- 
server and beneficent Patron. Every good 
gift in his possession comes from God, and 
it is God, Who maintains him in possession 
of it, for "in Him we live and move and 
have our being. " We can do absolutely 
nothing in the physical, moral, or intellec- 
tual order, without His concurrence. 

69. Consider the high superiority of 
nature, with which the Supreme Being has 
endowed man; making him the lord of 
creation. Consider, particularly, the noble 
understanding, received from his Creator 
and by means of which he is able to exer- 
cise his kingship, to subjugate the very 
forces of nature, and compel them to 
minister to his needs and his pleasures. 

70. God is, therefore, not only our 
Creator, but also our constant and most 
Merciful Benefactor. By what better title 
can He demand our recognition, obedience 



THE BEING OF GOD. 57 

and adoration? What graver injustice, 
what blacker ingratitude can there be than 
to deny Him that homage to which He is 
so abundantly entitled? If men resent in- 
justice in this world and deem it punish- 
able; if ingratitude deeply affronts them: 
how shall it be with the One, Omnipotent 
and Eternal God, Who, as the Supreme 
Perfection, must be infinitely Just as well 
as infinitely Merciful? 

71. Yv T ho would not be shocked to see a 
son deny and treat with open contumely 
the mother who bore him and cared for him 
tenderly during the days of his helpless in- 
fancy, or the devoted father, who had pro- 
vided generously for his education and 
happiness in life ? Such a being would be 
looked upon as a monster of ingratitude, 
especially if he were depraved enough to lose 
no opportunity of insulting and of striving 
to injure his long suffering parents. And 
suppose, further, that, during the entire 
period of his misconduct, the ungrateful 
son had continued dependent entirely upon 
the bounty of his outraged parents, and that 
they had been soliciting him constantly and 
with utmost kindness, but in vain, to amend 



58 THE LIGHT OF FAITH, 

his conduct and return to filial duty. Would 
we not think such a son the vilest of 
wretches'? Why then is there no blame for 
those who deny the Grod, Who made them, 
upon Whom they depend for the very 
breath of their nostrils; or for those who, 
instead of obeying, combat Him, and in- 
stead of honoring Him, blaspheme His holy 
Name? 

72. Finally, on this issue, Grod is en- 
titled to rule the universe He has created. 
He governs the material universe by fixed 
laws, which are ever obeyed. His right to 
establish His law over His rational creatures 
is incontestible ; and the noble gift of intel- 
ligence with which man is endowed lays 
upon him the obligation not only of obeying 
the Divine law, but of co-operating with his 
God in the maintainance and enforcement 
of that law. But he who denies the very 
existence of Grod, by that very act contemns 
and despises His law and impeaches the 
dominion of Grod, not only over himself, 
but over all creation. He is a rebel and a 
deserter to the camp of the enemy. Such 
rebels are, unfortunately, too numerous, 
and their activity often, in seeking to 



THE BEING OF GOD. 59 

destroy Grod's kingdom upon earth, is very- 
great and persistent: and the results of 
their efforts are not only to deprive their 
Eternal Maker of their own love and obedi- 
ence, but to expel Him, also, from the 
hearts of others, and to rob heaven of its 
intended citizens. 

73. Unbelievers pretend at least to no 
infallibility — the pretension would be too 
absurd. However positive their assertions, 
they cannot but fear that there is probabil- 
ity of their being in the wrong, and of the 
millions of earnest and enlightened Chris- 
tian believers being right. At best, what a 
terrific risk they assume, in thus placing 
themselves in the arena against even a pos- 
sible Omnipotent and most Just Grod ! 

74, And if, as we believers affirm, there 
is a Grod, what can such men expect, if, 
when the end comes, they are brought im- 
penitent into the presence of His outraged 
justice? We have heard of men, like Inger- 
soll, before large audiences, making the 
Divine majesty the butt of a blasphemous 
jocularity. And not only could he do this 
with enjoyment, but thousands have sat long 
hours in public halls, listening to the vilifi- 



60 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

cation of their God, while not a few shared 
the impious mirth of the blasphemer. 

75. Continue , Oh propagators of un- 
belief! your active and far-reaching crusade 
against God and against His law ; strive to 
multiply the number of your aiders and 
abetters in this most perilous warfare: but, 
when at last the Divine Patience is in your 
cases utterly exhausted, complain not of the 
consequences which may be visited upon 
you. Complain not if God at last accepts 
your persistent challenge and deals with 
you as bitter enemies deserve to be dealt 
with ; enemies, whose blind and unremitting 
hostility has been directed against the 
Creator and Sovereign Lord of this mighty 
and most glorious Universe ! 

76. Our talk is ended, We have pur- 
sued our subject as far as it was possible at 
a single sitting. Much, very much more 
could be said on so exalted a theme, but we 
must come to a conclusion here. If I could 
only surmise that, what has been uttered 
from this platform, this evening, has found 
entrance into but one single upright but 
deluded mind and brought to it conviction 
of the existence and the rightful supremacy 



THE BEING OF GOD. 61 

of Glod; if it has stirred, in but one sincere 
but estranged heart, the desire to draw 
nearer the Heart of our Heavenly Father, I 
shall feel that my poor efforts have been 
gloriously rewarded. 



SECOND LECTURE. 
THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 

Life Physical and Life Spiritual: Life Mortal 
and Life Immortal. 

77. "Know Thyself" was the terse in- 
junction inscribed in letters of gold over 
the portico of the Delphic Oracle. During 
long centuries is has held its place firmly in 
popular use and esteem. This is owing to 
the fact that, though the average man may 
make little effort to obey, the justness of 
the behest is apparent at a glance. 

78. There is, indeed, an obligation rest- 
ing upon all of us, to endeavor at least to 
know ourselves; to know, in the first place, 
something of our general nature, as mem- 
bers of the great human family ; and in the 
second, something of the characteristics 
belonging to us as particular individuals. 

79. Our human nature is a precious gift " 
from Grod, and we owe it to the generous 
and Divine Giver to appreciate its immeas- 
urable value. 

(62) 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 63 

80. In these days of general and pas- 
sionate debate, ranging over the entire field 
of Christian faith, the questions of the 
origin and nature, and of the final destiny 
of man are largely discussed. The same 
contentious and aggressive disbelievers, who 
would strike, if they could, the One, Omni- 
potent Grod from His eternal throne, are 
seeking to rob mankind of its chief glory, 
the possession of a spiritual and immortal 
nature, fashioned according to the image 
and likeness of its Almighty Maker. 

81. We must stand for the honor and 
glory of our God, and for the dignity of our 
kind. We must be ready at all proper 
times and in all places to justify the faith 
which is in us, and to answer the challenges 
so often and so boldly flung at us. Also, 
rejoicing in the light which we possess, we 
should, as so many apostles of the truth, be 
ever ready to show that same light to 
others, to our misguided brothers, and to 
win them, by enlightening and persuasive 
reasoning, to the holy, beautiful and solac- 
ing faith of Jesus Christ. 

82. Let us this evening undertake a 
brief study of the nature of man, consider- 



64 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

ing it in the light of Christian doctrine , and 
in the darkness of atheistic pretensions. 

83. Such a study must arouse our inter- 
est and strengthen our belief, while, at the 
same time, it leaves us better equipped for 
the duty of communicating to others our 
saving and consoling faith. 

84. Let us deal first with the physical 
constitution of man, the animal nature 
which he shares with the brutes, but which, 
at the same time, is endowed with such a 
wonderful superiority, as to exclude ab- 
solutely the idea of its coming into existence 
without the intervention of a Divine Creator. 
No unprejudiced mind can examine with 
attention the physical structure of man, and 
conclude that anything so complex and so 
perfect could be fashioned without a 
supreme intelligence and a positive design, 
or believe it to be nothing but one of the 
forms of matter developed from an original 
nebula. 

85. The Poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
well puts the point in the following forcible 
lines : 

"Not iu the World of light alone, 
Where God has built his blazing throne, 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 65 

Nor yet alone on earth below, 
With belted seas that come and go, 
And endless isles of sunlit green 
Is all thy Maker's glory seen — 
Look in upon thy wondrous frame, 
Eternal wisdom still the same!" 

86. We are truly, even as to our bodies, 
fearfully and wonderfully made. If we con- 
sent to view the human body in its mechan- 
ical aspect, it is a machine to which nothing 
made by man approximates in the slightest 
degree. A framework, or skeleton, com- 
posed of about two hundred bones, gives it 
solidity and strength and protects also its 
delicate organs, while many of the partic- 
ular bones serve as levers upon which the 
muscles act to ensure easy motion in all its 
parts. Each of these bones has its own 
shape, the shape best suited to the partic- 
ular office it has to discharge. About five 
hundred muscles cover the bony frame- 
work, filling out the body into shape and 
symetry. Coupled together, as a rule, in 
opposing pairs, with the resultant power of 
expansion and contraction alternately, these 
muscles render possible every necessary and 
useful movement. Some are involuntary 
and keep the vital organs in regular and 
5 



66 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

unceasing operation, others are voluntary, 
at our entire command, enabling us to act 
at will. The skin is stretched over all, a 
fine and delicate membrane, at once a pro- 
tecting garment to the tender flesh and a 
necessary organ, helping to cast forth the 
effete matter from the system, and aiding 
the lungs in the absorbtion of necessary 
oxygen. The organs of voice, with the 
modifying help of lips, tongue, palate and 
teeth, enable us to produce the most won- 
derful combinations of sound. The lungs, 
double- wrapped, seize the life giving oxygen 
from the air, and consign it to the blood for 
distribution through the system, relieving 
the blood at the same time of the poisonous 
charge with which it enters the lungs, 
made up of carbonic acid gas, and water 
foul with waste material. Heart, arteries, 
veins, capillaries, are organs by means of 
which the circulation of the blood is 
effected. The heart is the pump, and it is 
in all respects the most perfect and efficient 
of pumps, with its four chambers and model 
valves. This marvelous mechanical con- 
trivance — this term being used in a meta- 
phorical sense — makes one hundred thou- 



THE MYSTERY OP LIFE. 67 

sand beats or throbs every day, thirty- 
seven millions every year, and during a 
lifetime of say seventy-five years from two 
to three billions without stop. The weight 
of blood in the body of an ordinary adult 
may be put down at twelve pounds, and 
the entire quantity passes into and out of 
the heart in an interval of from one to 
two minutes ; and any particular portion of 
the blood is forced around the entire circuit 
of the body in about twenty-two seconds. 
Considering its uninterrupted manipulation 
of the blood, which fluid is being constantly 
renewed, an ordinary heart, though no 
larger than the fist, during a long life will 
have propelled by its unflagging exertions, 
three hundred thousand tons of blood. 

87. The vital fluid itself, the blood, is 
worthy of more than passing notice. A 
thin, colorless liquid, called plasma, serves 
to float the minute red and white disks 
and globules, several hundred of the red 
ones to each one of the white. It is the 
presence of these red disks which gives 
color to the blood. So minute are these 
red corpuscles that thirty-two hundred of 
them, lying side by side, would form a row 



68 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

only one inch long. If piled one on top of 
the other, it would take twelve thousand of 
them to attain the height of an inch ! "We 
can form some notion of the vast multitude 
of them in the entire body, when we are in- 
formed that in so little as a cubic millimeter 
(V25 inch) of blood it is estimated that five 
million of them may be found. They are 
forming continually and dying also, Draper 
declares, twenty millions of them at every 
breath. 

88. Every portion of the body the blood 
visits, except the cuticle, nails, hair, etc,, 
bearing in its plasma albumen for the 
muscles and mineral matter for the bones ; 
and its disks are so many barges, bearing 
on the current, through the arteries and 
from the lungs, life-giving oxygen, and 
freighting back through the veins to the 
lungs an exchange cargo of carbonic acid 
gas and effete matter. 

89. The perpetual waste progressing 
ever within the human system needs to be 
repaired, and the material consumed to be 
replaced. This office our food and drink 
fulfills, about two pounds of the former 
being requisite daily and from five to six 



THE MYSTEEY OF LIFE. 69 

pounds of the latter. The food substances 
needed or available for this purpose are 
varied, and in their natural state they are 
very far removed from the condition proper 
for admission into the blood. Considering 
that variety, and the considerable amount of 
preparation necessary to make most of our 
food capable of assimilation, it is to be ex- 
pected that the organs upon which falls this 
share of the work should be proportionately 
delicate, numerous and complex. It might 
extend unduly this portion of our discourse 
to enter at length upon a consideration of 
the digestive organs of man. Suffice it to 
say that nature responds wisely and effect- 
ively to this demand upon her, and that she 
has furnished for the purpose a most per- 
fect laboratory, with a complete set of 
knives and pestles in the teeth, of filters, 
baths, chemicals, etc. 

90. The brain, the organ most con- 
cerned, perhaps, in the act of thinking, the 
nervous system, and every part of the 
human body in fact, had we time to deal 
with each in detail, would furnish interest- 
ing subjects for study, but we have already 
accomplished the purpose of refreshing our 



70 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

knowledge in general of the marvelous 
aggregation of delicate and complex organs 
composing our bodies, each organ or com- 
bination of organs performing with unfail- 
ing perseverance and regularity the func- 
tions assigned to it; all in absolute har- 
mony, all acting together. It is this won- 
derful aggregation of perfect mechanisms 
which some of our evolutionist friends 
would have us believe to have developed 
out of original "star dust," without design 
and without intelligent direction of any 
kind. 

91. True it is that the wonders of phys- 
ical structure we have just been considering 
belong to man in common with the brute 
creation. This has led to a general classifi- 
cation which associates man with the mon- 
keys, the lemurs, and vouchsafes him only 
the distinction of a family, Hominidae, to 
himself. Some eminent scientists have been 
unwilling to approve this classification, 1 
protesting against the grouping of man with 
the beasts, and contending that he justly 

1 Quatrefages is among the number. Geoffroy St. 
Hilaire would have man in a kingdom to himself: 
Owen placed him in a sub-class. 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 71 

was entitled to classification by himself, as 
possessing reason, a characteristic separat- 
ing him as fundamentally from the brute as 
sensibility and voluntary locomotion separ- 
ate the beast from the vegetable. To me 
there seems here a yielding to some extent 
to disbelief, which is ever striving to estab- 
lish a brotherhood between the human and 
the brute. 

92. The purpose of classification is 
segregation as well as aggregation. In other 
words, it is intended as much to accentuate 
family distinctions, as to mark family sim- 
ilarities. Man may possess a body similar 
to that of the brute, but has he not, also in 
common with the brutes, all the qualities 
which distinguish the vegetable from the 
mineral? Why then are not men and 
animals all retained in one grouping com- 
mon with the vegetables, and allowed no 
other? Again man and all the animals and 
vegetables, constituting together the organic 
kingdom, disclose all the properties which 
belong to the inorganic or mineral king- 
dom ; why are they allowed to classify sep- 
arately? The reason is, because the veget- 
able is the mineral, plus vitality or growth 
and the power of reproduction, etc. ; and 



72 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

the animal has all the vegetable possesses, 
plus other endowments, such as sensibility, 
voluntary locomotion, etc. It is the sub- 
stantial addition of something higher in 
each case which establishes the difference 
of class. Now, upon the same principle, 
why not in classifying recognize the marked 
distinctions between man and all the lower 
forms of life? Are not the superlativeness 
of his intelligence, his possession of con- 
science, of a sense of responsibility, the gift 
of speech, or language, to say nothing of 
other excellencies, sufficient to set him 
apart in a group or class to himself? 

93. It will be observed that, without 
modification, the prevaling classification is 
pregnant with denials of the soul in man, 
and consequently also of the idea of immor- 
tality. It is, on the other hand, in thorough 
accord with the view which excludes, or 
denies, the spiritual, whether that spiritual 
be existent in a Divine and Supreme Being, 
or in any creature like man. This is the 
view of the atheist; and, according to it, 
men and the lower living forms as well, are 
actually machines, performing certain func- 
tions for a time only, under the operation 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 73 

of natural or physical laws. And these 
wonderful machines, extreme evolution 
maintains, developed, like all other things 
in this great universe, from an original 
nebula, vapor or gas. 

94. This comparison of man to a 
machine, or to a collection of machines 
working together in union and harmony, is 
not happy. At best it reflects but little 
light upon the subject, and it is misleading, 
because of the suggestions to which it is apt 
to give rise. Viewing man as a whole, what 
substantial likeness does he present to an 
engine of any sort, further than that both 
accomplish results by working, and that the 
appliances constituting portions of our 
human structure, such as levers, valves, 
etc., have, by way of suggestion, served 
mankind, when it came to constructing 
machinery? 

95. What engine is there which origin- 
ated in a particle of steel, that particle 
multiplying itself, or forming a multitude 
of other particles from itself, and thus 
growing first into a small and less perfect 
piece of mechanism, and, finally after years 
attaining to full efficiency? Yet precisely 



74 THK LIGHT OF FAITH. 

this is the history of development in each 
individual man; first an embryo , then a 
babe, and eventually an adult. 

96. What machine is there which builds 
and maintains itself, adding to, and en- 
larging itself, repairing breaks not absolut- 
ely destructive to itself, repairing, also, 
during every instant of its working, a 
frightful wear and tear in its every part and 
portion? All of this the living body is 
doing during all the term of its life. 

97. Nor should we ignore the constitu- 
tion of man's physical nature, in so far as 
it is made up of numerous organs, each not 
only discharging its own peculiar functions, 
but at the same time contributing essenti- 
ally to the discharge by the others of the 
functions assigned to them. To justify this 
comparison, therefore, in view of the blend- 
ing together throughout the body of the 
various organs while discharging their 
respective offices, we would have to imagine 
a mechanical multiplicity in unity, a com- 
mingling or forcing together as it were of a 
number of different machines into the same 
compass, with their respective rods and 
pistons interlaced, and their respective 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 75 

wheels and levers operating side by side ; 
each engine unimpeded by the operations, 
or by the parts of the others, and each dis- 
charging its own functions, as it were, 
through the material substance of the others. 

98. As a matter of fact, however, we 
have no right, in pursuing this comparison, 
to deal with the whole body as a unit, or 
even with the various organs as units. Our 
bodies are composed of an inconceivable 
number of tiny cells, each separate and dis- 
tinct, and each an individual worker in the 
building up and maintenance of the entire 
structure. If there be mechanism in the 
matter, each of these cells is a separate 
machine, doing its own work in its own 
sphere, though, of course, all co-operating 
with one another in complete harmony. 
The human body, in this aspect, would be 
an aggregation of machines, too tiny to be 
seen except with the microscope, and count- 
ing by the myriads. 

99. "The tiniest speck of living matter, " 
says one of the most distinguished micro- 
scopists of our time, Dr. Lionel S. Beale, 
in his work, Life Theories and Religious 
Thought, "exhibits no structure to account 



76 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

for its actions, and it contains no machinery. 
It belongs to a system altogether different 
from the mechanical world. It is not in the 
least degree like a clock, for no two of its 
'ticks' are alike. Every one of its molecules 
makes its own wheels and cranks and springs 
and pendulum, and sets itself going and 
winds itself up, and makes new clocks, and 
in a moment, as perfect and as powerful 
and as strong as the parent, and all this 
though completely destitute of works or 
machinery of any kind. And there are 
millions of such molecules in the most min- 
ute parts of every living organism. Many 
of them acting in harmony, now tending 
one way, now another; now appearing to 
obey gravitation, now moving, and with 
equal velocity, in defiance of the great law. 
To compare a living thing with a clock is, 
then, misleading, and it is perversely mis- 
leading. The molecules of matter that is 
alive are arranged as they were never before 
arranged. Elements which have the strong- 
est affinity for one another, are separated 
from their combinations, and perhaps made 
to combine with elements with which they 
have no natural tendency to unite ; and all 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 77 

this is effected, not as we see it done in the 
laboratory by the skilful chemist after pro- 
longed experience and by the aid of complex 
contrivances, but silently, and, as it were, 
by a fiat, without any apparatus whatever. ?? 

100. Having convinced ourselves that 
we are not, even in our physical nature, 
mere machines, let us consider whether it 
be true that both the involuntary actions 
of our vital organs and our voluntary move- 
ments are all the result of the operation of 
physical forces alone. But, as by physical 
forces we mean the forces we observe at 
work in the material universe, such as gravi- 
tation, cohesion, chemical affinity, etc., if 
this contention be true, man has little occa- 
sion for pride, since he is little better, if 
anything, than the stone which falls in 
obedience to the law of gravitation, or the 
brook which murmurs in the valley, or the 
gases which are combined to form our 
atmosphere. 

101. Not only is it urged that the opera- 
tions of our bodily organs in the perform- 
ance of vital functions are thus the effects 
of physical force alone, but it is likewise 
affirmed that our mental action, our senti- 



78 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

ments, emotions and passions spring from 
the same source. All from first to last, we 
are informed, are the products of the evolu- 
tionary process. 

102. "The human mind itself/' says 
Dr. Tyndall,— "emotion, intellect, will, and 
all their phenomena— were once latent in a 
fiery cloud. ?? Again the same authority: 
"Many who hold the hypothesis of natural 
evolution, would probably assent to the po- 
sition that at the present moment all our 
philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, 
all our art — Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, 
Da Vinci — are potential in the fires of the 
sun.' ? 

103. This is certainly an enormous task 
to lay upon that god of evolution, the orig- 
inal fiery cloud, with its wonderful poten- 
tialities ; to bring forth not only the mighty 
stars and planets, but also the science of 
Newton, the poetry of Shakespeare and the 
art of Da Vinci. To accomplish such ex- 
tended results, development or growth must 
have been forced to make a very long pro- 
gress, indeed, and a most difficult one. 

104. We have already considered objec- 
tions militating fatally against this theory 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 79 

of godless evolution , as a means of explana- 
tion for the constitution and condition of 
the material universe itself. We have had 
solid reasons for satisfying ourselves that 
evolution alone could not possibly account 
for the evidences of design and intelligent 
control, manifested in every detail of visible 
creation ; that blind and undirected forces 
could not possibly have conducted formless 
nebula through a vast series of changes, 
culminating in forms of high perfection and 
beauty, of endless variety, of incredible 
complexity, such as we behold in limitless 
profusion even in the non - living world 
around us. 

105. We might, however, yield the de- 
bate thus far, and concede that the non- 
living world has thus developed from origi- 
nal nebula ; but at this point we would find 
an impassible gulf yawning in the way of 
the further progress of the theory. All 
nature is divided into two great primary 
kingdoms, which by common acceptance 
are designated as the inorganic and the 
organic. A designation more suitable for 
our present purposes would be the living 
and the non-living; since life constitutes 
the differentiating element. 



80 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

106. "Living things/ 7 says Huxley (En- 
cyclopaedia Britannica, article Biology), 
" which present this visible structure, are 
said to be organized; and so widely does 
organization obtain among living beings, 
that 'organized' and 'living' are not un- 
frequently used as if they were terms of 
co-extensive applicability. This, however, 
is not exactly accurate, if it be thereby 
implied that all living things have a visible 
organization, as there are numerous forms 
of living matter of which it cannot properly 
be said that they possess either a definite 
structure or permanently specialized organs : 
though, doubtless, the simplest particle of 
living matter must possess a highly complex 
molecular structure, which is far beyond the 
reach of vision." 1 

107. A careful study of the organic, or 
living, kingdom should convince us that it 
is absolutely distinct from the inorganic, 

1 This is not an accurate statement. Protoplasm 
itself, of which every living cell is largely composed, 
is structural. "All have now agreed, however," says 
Arthur E. Bostwick (in "What is lyife?" '—Everybody's 
Magazine for February, 1902), "that protoplasm has a 
structure and consists essentially of a framework of 
some kind, filled with a soft or liquid substance." 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 81 

and constitutes of itself an order of creation: 
that the forces which move it and the laws 
which control it are essentially dissimilar 
from those moving and controlling the world 
of non-living matter. 

108. The ultimate living unit is the cell; 
very minute and consisting of a membran- 
ous envelope or sack, containing the proto- 
plasm, or bioplasm, supposed to be the 
original substance from which all living 
beings are developed, principally. 

109. "As the body is composed of indi- 
vidual organs/ 7 says the American, or 
Appleton's, Cyclopaedia, article Absorbtion, 
"and each organ of separate tissues, so each 
tissue is made up of minute cells. Each 
cell is a little world by itself, too small to 
be seen by the naked eye, but open to the 
microscope. It has its own form and con- 
stitution, as much as a special organ in the 
body. It absorbs from the blood such food 
as suits its purposes. Moreover, the num- 
ber of cells in an organ is as constant as 
the number of organs. As the organs ex- 
pand with the growth of the body, so the 
cells of each tissue enlarge, but shrink again 



82 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 



with age and the decline of life. Life be- 
gins and ends in a cell." 1 

110. This is all applicable as well to the 
vegetable kingdom as to the animal. In the 
lowest forms in both kingdoms, one cell 
may and does constitute a being complete. 
As the scale is ascended, the number of 
cells increases, until in the larger animals 
and man they attain to enormous multi- 

1 What is life, is and will probably forever remain 
one of nature's secrets, hidden from human compre- 
hension. Our knowledge of it, as of gravitation, etc., 
is confined to its manifestations. It is a something in 
or of the living body, which preserves it from corrup- 
tion and renders possible, if it does not actually give, 
the powers which that body exercises. Departing, it 
takes from that body the power of action and surrenders 
it to decomposition. So far as observation can go, to it 
may be credited, in addition to sensation, the three 
mystic powers characterizing living and individualized 
matter: the power of growth, involving the processes 
of nutrition ; the power of movement, both involuntary 
and voluntary ; and the power of reproduction, or of 
giving birth, in some shape or other, to other beings 
of its own kind. Certain experimenters claim to have 
produced what they hold to be fair imitations of proto- 
plasmic substance, but these are imitations only. Their 
makers have never been able to invest such products 
with the faculties or powers of true living matter: and 
until they can do this, they remain as far from the 
solving of the great mystery as are the makers of the 
wax figures to be found in our dime museums. 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 83 

tudes, retaining always, however, each its 
distinct individuality. 

111. Dr. Lionel S. Beale, Professor dur- 
ing several years of Physiology and of 
General and Morbid Anatomy in the King's 
College, London, England, studied closely, 
and with powerful microscopes, the forma- 
tion and characteristics of these cells, and 
of the substance in general of living bodies. 
He found that general substance composed 
of matter in two states. 

112. "Every tissue' ? , he says in Life 
Theories and Religious Thought, "may be 
divided anatomically, into elementary parts. 
Each elementary part consists of the living 
matter, or bioplasm, and the lifeless formed 
matter (cell-wall, envelope, tissue, inter- 
cellular substance, periplastic matter) pro- 
duced at the moment of the death of the 
particles of the first. Formed matter ac- 
cumulates in the tissues as age advances, 
and thus interferes with the free access of 
nutrient matter to the bioplasm. 

113. "As we grow old, the proportion of 
the living to the lifeless matter of the or- 
ganism becomes less and less, but, even in 
advanced age, and in the dryest of growing 



84 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

tissues , living matter is still to be demon- 
strated in considerable amount, and can be 
discovered in advanced age without diffi- 
culty." 

114. These cells, we learn from the same 
high authority, are often of less measure- 
ment than the one two-thousandth of an 
inch. They are all developed, as we shall 
see more definitely hereafter, from an 
original, embryonic cell. They are formed 
in first instance near the sources of their 
nutriment, being at that point small and 
thickly set in one common mass of formed 
or lifeless matter. As they become older, 
they pass outward from the centres of for- 
mation, separate themselves from the com- 
mon mass of formed matter each with its 
own envelope or cell wall, increase in size, 
divide and subdivide, and finally, toward 
the outward surface, lose life. In this way, 
movements of bioplasmic matter are always 
going on, as it were outward from within. 

115. The movements of these tiny mas- 
ses, as described by Beale, are very peculiar 
and most interesting; and, instead of being 
in consonance with physical laws or in 
obedience to physical forces, they are, on 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 85 

the contrary, totally independent of both, 
and indeed to a great extent they are in 
defiance of them. "The remarkable fact," 
says Beale, "was demonstrated that a min- 
ute portion of transparent, colorless, living 
matter exhibited very peculiar movements 
— movements which could not be explained 
by any known laws. One part of the bio- 
plasm could be seen to move in advance of 
another part, or over it, as it were, or through 
it, just as if the mass of living matter con- 
sisted of colorless fluid, every particle of 
which had the capacity of movement at the 
same time. One part could be seen to move, 
as it were, into or through another part, in 
one case blending partially or completely, 
in another apparently remaining distinct 
from the rest." 

116. We have seen enough of the con- 
stitution of these bodies of ours, and enough 
at the same time of the general constitution 
of all living organisms, to declare that there 
is no true analogy between the general 
physical forces characterizing and govern- 
ing matter strictly as such, and those forces 
termed vital, which are entirely special, 
being found invariably in connection with 



86 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

life, and in no other connection whatsoever. 
Identity is a fact to be proven as any other, 
and to assume the identity of vital and of 
physical force is certainly not a very exact 
proceeding on the part of men who claim 
to be "exact thinkers' \ Worse still; not 
only has their assumption nothing rising to 
the dignity of proof to support it, but it is 
flatly contradicted by the absolute dissimi- 
larities which the two kinds of forces, to 
the annoyance of evolutionists, persist in 
manifesting. It is, to say the least, a very 
crooked kind of science which leads its vot- 
aries, in the presence of all the multitudinous 
phenomena of nature, to seize upon any and 
every one, which may seem to favor their 
particular theories and give to them an 
appearance of controlling importance, and 
at the same time to slur over and belittle 
other phenomena, of highest dignity, be- 
cause they bear so strongly against their 
own fixed convictions. 

117. But let us proceed a little further in 
our study of vital phenomena, so as to bring 
out more clearly the radical distinction be- 
tween them and physical phenomena. Every 
living creature, however complex its organi- 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 87 

zation, has its beginning in a single cell. 1 
This single cell, except where the individual 
is unicellular, in time multiplies itself within 
the original structure, and the new cells 
thus produced differentiate. Within the 
egg of the hen, for instance, before hatching 
has begun, in the centre of the yolk is the 
embryo. From that tiny and seemingly 
simple mass develops the full grown chicken, 
with organs, beak, feathers, claws, all com- 
plete. This development, accomplished 
principally through the division and multi- 
plication of cells, is rendered possible by 
nutrition, which is one of the great marvels 
of vital phenomena, and one of the promi- 
nent landmarks of the organic kingdom. 
118. If the one original cell is to multi- 

1 And all embryos, be they vegetable or animal, ot 
worm or man, so far as mere seeming goes, are alike. 
* 'Compare next" — says Drummond, Natural L,aw in the 
Spiritual World, Essay 8, p. 258 — "the two sets of 
germs, the vegetable and the animal. And there is 
still no shade of difference. Oak and palm, worm and 
man, all start life together. No matter into what 
strangely different forms they may afterwards develop, 
no matter whether they are to live on sea or land, creep 
or fly, swim or walk, think or vegetate, in the embryo, 
as it first meets the eye of science, they are undis- 
tinguishable." 



88 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

ply into a myriad, there must evidently be 
some material supplied which shall enable 
the multiplication to progress. Further- 
more, as the living form while constructing 
itself is suffering a continual waste, part of 
the nutriment it takes in goes to repairing 
this waste, and the surplus goes to promot- 
ing the growth which marks the earlier 
periods of life, until the living organism has 
attained its allotted size or proportions. 
Nutrition is, therefore, the process by which 
a living organism draws non-living matter 
from the outer world into itself, and trans- 
forms it into living substance. 

119. For the developed animal, the or- 
gans of digestion, as we have already seen, 
do the preliminary work, taking into the 
system, in shape of food, the raw material 
and reducing it to a condition fitted for the 
use to which it is eventually destined. It 
is, however, the bioplasm of the myriad 
cells which appropriates, or absorbs the 
nutrient matter thus prepared, and performs 
the work of transformation, changing what 
an instant before was lifeless, into part and 
portion of its living self. 

120. Very wonderful is the fact that, 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 89 

though all of the myriad cells come from 
one and the same original germ, though 
they are themselves each formed by the 
division of a prior bioplast and side by 
side with their neighbors all, and though 
they disclose, as a rule, no substantial dif- 
ference of form or texture; yet the work 
they accomplish is not all alike, and each 
addresses itself solely and strictly to its 
own particular service. "It would have 
been impossible, 7 ' Dr. Beale informs us, 
"had the tissue been examined at an early 
period, to determine which was a nerve 
bioplast, which a pigment bioplast, and 
which was to take part in the formation of 
a vessel, or at length to assume the form of 
a blood corpuscle. But all these bioplasts 
have descended from a common bioplastic 
mass." 

121. Our friends, the disbelievers, say 
that life has developed by a long, slow pro- 
cess, from non-living matter under the 
operation of physical forces or laws. This 
is a singularly bold assertion, because it is 
unsupported by proof, and because further 
it is contradicted by our common every day 
experience. Life is a chain, following link 



90 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

after link in a line of succession. The son 
is from the father, and the latter from his 
father, and so on ; all lines of human gene- 
alogy ascending in this way to the first 
parents of our race, Adam and Eve. It will 
readily be perceived how fatally this char- 
acteristic of living matter militates against 
the theory of evolution, and what a gap it 
opens between the organic and inorganic ; 
how it obligates the extreme evolutionist to 
account for the origin of life as well as of 
non-living matter, all without an intelligent 
cause. 

122. Spontaneous Generation, or Abio- 
genesis, as it is likewise called, is relied 
upon by some, though these are bound to 
go beyond the pale of all human observation 
to locate it. It is conceded that observable 
phenomena testify against the idea of any 
living creature being produced without a 
parent, 1 but it is urged that in the domain 

1 ' 'These and other experiments," says Tyndall 
(Floating Matter in the Air, essay 5, p. 285J, dealing 
with the work of Pasteur, in this line, * 'carried out 
with a severity perfectly obvious, and accompanied by 
a logic equally severe, restored the conviction that, 
even in these lower reaches of the scale of being, life 
does not appear without the operation of antecedent 
life." 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 91 

of the minuter forms it may be that such a 
thing occurs. The wisdom of the rule, ex 
■uno disce omnes, from one judge all, few 
will attempt to gainsay; what, then, shall 
we say of men, who venture to imagine an 
exception in the domain of the invisible, 
entirely contrary to a law which everything 
within the reach of our observation declares 
to be inflexible! 

123. Professor Huxley (Critiques and 
Addresses, page 239) takes another line, 
in attempting to meet the difficulty. Con- 
ceding that actual experience is against the 
supposition in any case of life springing up 
spontaneously, he strives to repair the dam- 
age done, by "confessing" that, if it were 
given to him to look beyond the abyss of 
geologically recorded time to the still more 
remote period when the earth was passing 
through earlier physical and chemical con- 
ditions, he should expect to be a witness to 
the evolution of living protoplasm from 
non-living matter. The logic of this is, 
that what does not and cannot now take 
place, Professor Huxley is willing for his 
own purposes to "confess" might have 
happened in times and places whereof 



92 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

neither he, nor any one else, can have any 
actual knowledge. Thus is it that this 
exact reasoner seeks, by one of the wildest 
possible flights of fancy, to give the lie to 
the testimonies nature brings forward 
against his theories, under his very eyes. 

124. The gulf we have been considering 
is the one between the merely living and the 
non-living. There is such a thing as life, 
with the functions absolutely needed for its 
maintenance and propagation, and nothing 
more. This condition may be observed in 
the vegetable kingdom. But there is an- 
other order of phenomena, observable in 
connection with certain particular forms of 
life, and in no other connection whatsoever. 
These are the phenomena indicative of 
mental power, or mind; that rational, or 
intellectual, faculty, which conceives, rea- 
sons, judges, remembers, imagines. The 
fact that there is an order of living things, 
endowed with life, but without mind, those 
belonging to the vegetable kingdom, demon- 
strates clearly that the two are not necessary 
concomitants. It cannot be said that mind 
is in any shape or degree, however limited, 
an absolute essential of animated nature, 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 93 

for there are many forms of life having 
nothing resembling it. 

125. We may, however, concede to the 
brutes the possession of a something re- 
sembling mind, or of a certain rude and 
extremely limited species of intelligence. 
Indeed, Holy Scripture itself speaks of the 
beast as having a spirit, which, unlike the 
spirit of man, goes downward; by which is 
meant that it is perishable. 

126. The gap between mere life, and 
mind in its lowest state, is as enormous as 
is that between the organic and inorganic, 
living and non-living. No more than life 
and its operations, is mind to be accounted 
for by considering solely physical forces, 
or material laws. Its composition possesses 
none of the qualities which enable us to 
distinguish matter ; its field of operation is 
peculiar to itself ; its methods of action are 
not to be in any way assimilated to those 
of matter under obedience to physical forces. 
In fact, matter is a senseless slave, and 
physical force, if at all a master, is a blind 
one. Mind, on the other hand, is truly a 
master, and is not blind; and none of the 
known physical forces exert direct control 
over it. 



94 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

127. But it is in man, the highest type 
of visible living entities, that we must study 
mind in order to form a just conception of 
its nature. Atheists , while assailing the 
very existence of God, impugn, also, the 
dignity of man. The human being, accord- 
ing to them, is merely a brute, with faculties 
more developed and improved. In attempt- 
ing to establish something in the nature of 
a common plane, they seek to elevate the 
beast, by dwelling upon the occasional 
evidences it gives of what they choose to 
consider the reasoning faculty, and to de- 
press man, by bringing forward the debased 
condition of the lowest of savage tribes. 
The gap, it is pretended, between the high- 
est brute and the lowest man is narrow 
enough to be, as it were, stepped across. 

128. Now, it is not a fact that the gap 
between the highest brute and the lowest 
man is so very narrow. No matter how 
degraded the barbarian may be, he has a 
mental faculty which no brute possesses. 
He can observe nature and draw some in- 
ferences and conclusions as to the purport 
of what he sees. He can meet the necessi- 
ties of his condition by devising ins-tru- 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 95 

ments, and manufacturing such as are neces- 
sary or useful to him in the life he leads. 
He can and does carry on a system of trade, 
or exchange of commodities or of services, 
even though limited. He has language, 
enabling him to accumulate, at the least, 
an unwritten literature, if we may venture 
to call it such, consisting of myths, precepts, 
histories, etc., which is handed down from 
generation to generation. He can communi- 
cate with the outside world, and can be 
made to comprehend the ideas which that 
outer world has to impart. Even in his most 
degraded state, he is capable of both indi- 
vidual and tribal improvement and eleva- 
tion, if only circumstances alter, so as to 
incite, or enable him to rise. To compare 
such beings, even in the state in which they 
are, to the beasts or to even lower forms, 
whose highest development is to herd to- 
gether upon the plains, or fly in flocks, or 
swarm together like bees in or out of the 
hive, or ants in their hills; who have no 
actual language and no literature or tradi- 
tion, no trade or commerce ; who can con- 
ceive of or fashion no implements worthy 
of the name ; who can apprehend nothing 



96 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

which does not, as it were, touch their very 
bodies, or lie beneath their very eyes; who, 
for lack of an adequate intelligence, cannot 
be communicated with by man, except with- 
in the most limited lines, as in the case of 
domesticated animals; to liken, I say, man 
in any of his conditions to such creatures, 
is to wilfully close one's eyes and mind to 
facts the most unmistakable. 

129. Nor is this method of comparison 
in the least degree legitimate. We are deal- 
ing with kingdoms and not with individuals. 
We are concerned in this discussion with 
entire humanity, and not with any particu- 
lar tribe which may have ignobly fallen 
below the standard or average. Indeed, we 
have greater right to insist upon considera- 
tion being had of the highest types of man- 
kind, rather than the lowest, for the former 
is the true indication of the capabilities of 
our kind. 

130. While on this point, let us ask our 
evolutionist friends how they, who have 
such high regard for "potentialities" in 
matter, manage to ignore potentiality en- 
tirely when it comes to dealing with their 
brother men? Are they not aware that a 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 97 

little contact with the outside world ; inocu- 
lation with the spirit of general commerce ; 
the opening of mines and building of rail- 
roads, and the establishment of factories; 
a few generations of popular education : do 
they not know that these things can work 
wonders even with the rudest among savage 
nations ? x 

131. On the other hand, has not an ex- 
perience of thousands of years with all of 
the brute creation demonstrated to us con- 
clusively that there is not, in any species of 
them whatsoever, any such potentiality? 
Are we not aware by this time that a super- 
ior power has fixed an absolute limit, beyond 
which it is impossible for any of them to 
rise? The dog and the cat, the horse and 
the ox, the sheep and the goat, and even 
that pet of evolutionists, the ape, have been 
in long and intimate contact with our human 
civilization, and yet not one among them 
all has become notably wiser or more civi- 

1 "The Fuegians rank amongst the lowest barbar- 
ians ; but I was continually struck with surprise, how 
closely the three natives on board H. M. S. Beagle, who 
lived some years in England and could talk a little 
English, resembled us in disposition and in most of our 
mental faculties." — Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 65. 
7 



98 THE LIGTH OF FAITH. 

lized than were their ancestors, in the olden 
days, which left to us the Egyptian mum- 
mies, We who live within the bounds of 
this great American Union, this centre of 
enlightenment and civilization, need to hear 
no panegyric preached upon the grandeur 
of human achievements. Our land is ribbed 
with a thousand railroads, bringing the most 
distant parts of this vast commonwealth 
into the closest relations with one another. 
Multitudes of telegraph and telephone wires 
line the sky, transmitting thought and 
speech upon the very wings of the lightning. 
Our steamers plough the seas in every direc- 
tion, and fret with the turnings of their scr&ws 
the waters of all our lakes and rivers. The 
smoke of countless factories rises into the 
air. Grreat cities increase, towns multiply 
and villages are growing everywhere: all 
throbbing with the pulsations of extraordi- 
nary life and activity. Tens of thousands 
of printing presses are busy day and night, 
causing to flow forth a mighty and unceas- 
ing flood of thought. Libraries, countless 
almost in number, have their . shelves filled 
with an accumulated and constantly in- 
creasing literature. 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 99 

132. How puerile, then, is the sophistry 
which, in the desperate effort to uphold 
fantastical theories, seeks to belittle the 
marvelous intelligence of man, by declaring 
that it is not substantially different from 
that exercised by the brutes. Because, for- 
sooth, it has been said that the elephant has 
been known to use leafy branches to whisk 
away an importunate fly, we are asked to 
recognize in this action the germ of man's 
inventive faculty! Because horses neigh 
and whinny, and sheep bleat in several 
tones, and dogs bark, yelp and whine: be- 
hold the rudiments of human language and 
human literature! The bird constructs its 
nest, and the beaver builds its dam: lo, 
here is the noble science of architecture in 
the seed! It is somewhat strange that our 
friends should have overlooked the cat, and 
failed to point to its occasional way of nip- 
ping grass upon our lawns, as the begin- 
ning, according to evolution, of medical 
science, as it now prevails among men. 

133. Xo! the exceedingly narrow intel- 
ligence which the brutes show is no more 
than faintest shadow, and not substance, of 
that sublime intelligence, which is upon the 



100 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

earth the exclusive birthright of man. The 
gap between instinct, or brute reason if we 
choose to call it so, and human reason, is 
enormous and impassable. Man and beast 
have long been on this earth side by side, 
and the evidence which uniform experience 
adduces is that the gulf has never even been 
in the slightest degree narrowed, much less 
obliterated. What right have evolutionists 
to proclaim that, what actual observation 
and actual experience prove to be an im- 
possibility, must have taken place at some 
period immeasurably remote, and totally 
beyond the reach of observation : and this 
simply because, for the upholding of their 
theories, it is necessary that these things be 
imagined? 

134. Man is not a development from the 
brute, but a special creation. Evolutionists 
speak of missing links, and are positive in 
their assertions that these links are simply 
lost, and persist in their prophesies that 
they will at some future time be found 
again, or accounted for. It is not a ques- 
tion of links, but of yawning chasms which 
are traversible only by the well exercised 
imaginations of certain men, some of whom 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 101 

are determined to see God under no circum- 
stances , in any of His sublime and mar- 
vellous works. 

135. While we have in mind the wonder- 
ful superiority of man over the brute, let 
us consider in what that superiority con- 
sists. It is not in his physical strength, or 
in the keenness of his corporeal senses. In 
neither of these particulars is he superior. 
On the contrary, for qualities exclusively 
physical, he is below very many of the 
brutes, and even some of the birds. This 
fact would place him at such disadvantage 
that, were it not for the society his genius 
has conceived and established, and for the 
deadly weapons he has invented and em- 
ploys, the lions and tigers, leopards and 
panthers, the bears and wolves, and even 
the vultures, would sweep him speedily 
from the face of the earth. 

136. The seat, and the sole seat of man's 
transcendent superiority lies in his intel- 
ligence. That, and that alone, has estab- 
lished his kingship over the face of the 
earth. With axes and plows and other im- 
plements of agriculture, his inventive genius 
has suggested, he has felled the forests and 



102 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

drained the marshes, and forced the un- 
willing earth to yield to him her hidden 
treasures. With his ships, he has sub- 
jugated the ocean. With his houses and 
structures, and his clothes, he has softened 
if not neutralized the rigors of climate; 
with his weapons he has established his ab- 
solute dominion over the entire kingdom of 
the brutes. Take from him his mental 
faculties, and the sublime fabric of his 
greatness would fall into immediate and 
hopeless ruin. 

137. How can our unbelieving friends 
account for this intellectual faculty in man, 
or for its very faint shadow or semblance, 
even, as found in the brutes? Why, the 
brain, of course, manufactures or secretes 
thought, by a strictly natural process, and 
in accordance with physical laws, just as 
the liver secretes bile. In the first place, 
the secretions of our bodies are not at all in 
accordance with any law or laws governing 
the inorganic world ; nor is such secretion 
effected by operation of the forces which 
control mere matter. In the second place, 
thought manifests no similarity in any 
respect to the secretions. One immeasur- 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 103 

able difference is that bile, tears, perspira- 
tion and the other secretions are all tangible 
things, to be observed by the senses; 
thought is intangible, and is not to be 
detected by sight, or touch, or hearing, or 
smell, or taste. 

138. A secretion, in the sense we are 
now dealing therewith, is a substance, 
coming originally from the blood, and 
given forth by particular glands for some 
useful purpose in the economy of the body. 
In every known case, secretion is strictly a 
local phenomenon, having no relationship 
whatsoever to the outside world. Thought^ 
on the other hand, is largely suggested by 
exterior things, and in its turn produces 
immediate, or eventual, exterior consequen- 
ces. A man is suffering, and our senses 
receive impressions which convey to us a a 
inward intelligence of his sad condition. 
Thought is aroused touching the thing 
without, the plight of the sufferer, and the 
result is help extended to the object of our 
commiseration. Is there the slightest thing, 
in all this process, at all similar in char- 
acter or appearence to the secretion of bile 
by the liver? 



1Q4 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

139. Again, the secretions are divided 
for production among the different glands, 
or sets of glands ; the work of each gland 
or set being distinct. The liver secretes 
bile, and not gastric juice; the gastric 
glands give forth gastric juice and no bile. 
The mind though simple, or single in its 
essence, is very complex in its operations. 
To apprehend, to remember, to compare, to 
draw inferences, to will are distinct opera- 
tions differing each widely from the others. 
If, therefore, the brain be a thought gland, 
or set of thought glands, it acts differently 
from all other glands or sets, since it pro- 
duces multiplicity, while they secrete each 
a singular. 1 

1 "The phosphorous philosophers have often com- 
pared thought to a secretion. 'The brain secretes 
thought, as the kidneys secrete urine, or as the liver 
bile/ are phrases which one sometimes hears. The 
tame analogy need hardly be pointed out. The mater- 
ials which the brain pours into the blood (chalesterin, 
creatin, xanthin, or whatever they may be) are the 
analogues of the urine and the bile, being in fact real 
secreta. As far as these matters go, the brain is a duct- 
less gland. But we know of nothing connected with 
liver and kidney activity which can be in the remotest 
degree compared with the stream of thought that 
accompanies the brain's material secretions. " James, 
Ps}^chology, Vol. I, chap. 3, p. 102. 



THE MYSTEKY OF LIFE. 105 

140. Nor is one thought the same in 
character as another. The thought of God 
is not one and the same thing a thought 
concerning man. In this view, human 
memories, imaginations, reasonings, judge- 
ments are myriad; and the same brain 
gland, or glands, Evolutionists pretend, 
secretes them all. 

141. And then, what about our pas- 
sions, emotions and sentiments? Love, 
jealousy, hate, fear, anger, pity, despair, 
hope: are all these results of various secret- 
ary processes? Who shall be found rash 
enough to answer this question affirmat- 
ively? 

142. Let us look again upon creation 
and consider its Creator. That Creator has 
no body, for He is above and beyond the 
trammels of flesh, or the conditions of 
matter in any shape. He must be, there- 
fore, and is, a pure spirit. We know Him 
originally by the evidences He has given of 
His Omnipotence and Infinite Intelligence. 
Do we not see that man, also, though upon 
a finite scale, exhibits a superior order of 
power and a high degree of intelligence, 
such as finds no parallel among other vis- 



106 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

ible creatures? Does he not thereby evi- 
dence the existence within himself of a 
nature resembling that of God and con- 
sequently spiritual? Is it not, therefore, 
rendered plain, that man, as Holy Scripture 
declares, is made in the image and likeness 
of God? 

143. It is but a step to the next conclu- 
sion, that the spiritual and higher nature of 
man is immortal. Of course, in this branch 
of our argument, we are proceeding upon 
the assumption that the hearer believes in 
the being of God, and in the existence, 
consequently, of spirit. With those deny- 
ing God, the field of debate must be differ- 
ent, and discussion must run on the lines 
laid down and pursued in our first lecture 
of this series, and also in the first portions 
of the present one. We must convince 
them that God is, and then argue as to the 
soul of man. 

144. Not only is God a spirit, but He is 
eternal, for the vast and enduring char- 
acter of the Universe proclaim not only the 
omnipotence of its Creator, but, also, His 
perfection and His immunity from decay 
and death. Man, made to the divine 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 107 

image, shows a likeness to the omnipotence 
of God, in the power he exerts ; he discloses 
a semblance of the infinite intelligence of 
G-od in the high order of the mental facul- 
ties with which he is endowed. Why not 
infer as well that his nature further re- 
sembles the divine by being imperishable? 

145. Despite all attempts at depreciation, 
how noble is the intelligence of man ! How 
it surpasses in dignity and grandeur all 
other greatness upon this earth of ours! 
Is is not, therefore, the noblest of God's 
creations in this world? Among men, do 
we not find that the more precious the 
thing made, the greater the precaution 
taken to render it durable? The magnifi- 
cent cathedral and the splendid palace are 
built of stone or brick, laid well with cement 
or mortar; the cheapest of lumber, nailed 
hastily together, suffices for the hovel. Can 
God be supposed to act less wisely? He 
who has made the senseless rocks all but 
eternal,' has He constituted the glorious 
soul of the individual man, so that it stands 
erect for a few brief years, then vanishes 
forever? Why should God destroy so 
sublime a work of His infinite wisdom? 



108 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

Why should He blot out forever this 
greatest and highest among the visible 
testimonials of His power and goodness? 

146. Again, we must observe the love 
which the Divine Creator bears towards 
humanity, by the position He has given to 
it in nature, by the rare and precious gifts 
with which He has endowed it. Do men 
hasten to destroy the things which are most 
dear to them? If not, why will men ascribe 
to the Deity a line of conduct from which 
they themselves, if they could possibly be 
called upon in such connection, would 
shrink, as senseless and absurd? 

147. We judge of the wisdom of men by 
their actions; and those actions in their 
turn are estimated in accordance with the 
motives which have dictated them, and the 
ends they subserve. A wise man does no 
serious act without a serious aim. An in- 
sane king of Bavaria manifested, among 
other ways, his madness by erecting a 
costly palace in a locality utterly unsuited. 
Shall the Almighty Grod be suspected of 
creating man as he is, so different from and 
so immensely superior to the brutes, with- 
out any sufficient motive for so doing? 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 109 

What adequate incentive can suggest itself 
in this connection, if it be not the one 
which Christian dogma advances: that the 
nobler gifts of man, the foundation upon 
which rests his superiority, are manifesta- 
tions of an exalted spiritual nature, con- 
fined for a time within the prison of the 
body, but destined to be released by the 
death of that body, and to live forever, 
free, blissful and resplendent? 

148. We can all give testimony at least 
to our own individual sensations, senti- 
ments, emotions and aspirations. Does not 
each and everyone in this audience know 
that he has a capacity for a higher enjoy- 
ment than any which this life can bestow, 
and feel a persistent longing for happiness 
undisturbed and unending? Can we not all 
testify that this longing is not satisfied by 
the things that this world has to offer, 
things which are so transitory and precari- 
ous, and which are so soon staled by 
custom? Shall we believe that Grod im- 
planted within us all a capacity for the en- 
joyment of a happiness far beyond what is 
attainable in this life, and yet has provided 
in no way for its attainment? Shall we 



110 THK LIGHT OF FAITH. 

believe that our Eternal and Merciful Father 
has filled us with yearnings, which He 
never intends shall be satisfied: that He 
has created voids in our hearts, which He 
has no design to fill? Shall we conclude 
that our Divine and Beneficent Lord gave 
to us longings so deep and earnest ; long- 
ings that He refuses to gratify, though He 
has it in His power so to do. 

149. An argument, not conclusive but 
highly corroborative, in favor of the exist- 
ence of Grod and of the after life, is to be 
drawn from what we may designate the 
demands of absolute justice. There is in 
the heart of everyone of us, not misguided 
by false education or debased by evil living, 
an innate love of justice, which causes us 
to earnestly desire that wrong should be 
exposed and adequately punished. Unless 
we be ourselves of the same sort, or we be 
true sychophants, our spirits rise partic- 
ularly against the "whited sepulchres, ?? of 
which unfortunally there are always so 
many in the world. We are content when 
the assassin, the robber, or the criminal of 
any description, whose offence falls within 
the limited category of express statutory 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. Ill 

proscription, is apprehended and visited 
with merited punishment. Though leniency 
will be justified by all, in behalf of the 
truly contrite and thoroughly reformed sin- 
ner, no sane man, be he ever so skeptical, 
will deny that it must be the ideal con- 
dition, if attainable, to have every stubborn 
and persistent wrongdoer doomed to the 
sure infliction of proper chastisement at 
some time and in some way. But this ideal 
condition of justice, certainly and fully 
vindicated in every case against the ob- 
stinate criminal, is not to be had in this 
world. By far the greater proportion of 
the evil acts which men do are not de- 
nounced by our penal codes; and a very 
large number of those particular transgres- 
sions, which the penal law actually de- 
nounces, never come to the knowledge of 
the courts, or if discovered, their perpe- 
trators, through the power of wealth, or of 
high influence, or by bribery, perjury and 
fraud, escape retribution in this life. 1 

1 In a recent (1904) press dispatch we find forcible 
demonstration of the truth of this declaration : 

"Boston, April 10. — Human life is cheaper in Mas- 
sachusetts than in any other part of the United States, 
according to statistics of the State and city, which 



112 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

There is among men a vast amount of 
vice, open, flaunting, triumphant, which 
temporal justice is too blind to see, or too 
powerless to assail. That perfect and un- 
failing justice, which is one of our general 
human ideals, can come only from Grod, 
against Whose infinite intelligence the 
human heart has no secrets, and before 
Whose omnipotent power, king and beg- 
gar are alike. Since such absolute justice 
is not to be found in this life, if admin- 
istered at all it must be so administered in 
another life, above and beyond this present 

show an astounding record of mysterious murders in 
the last decade, for which no one has been punished, 
in which the murderer has not been traced down, and 
which is unparalleled by any state. 

"Crimes have been perpetrated in broad daylight 
and in public places, nearly all accomplished by 
violence, yet when arrested suspects have been ac- 
quitted or discharged, and the problems remain un- 
solved. As for the reason, "sentimental juries,' ' says 
State Chief Shaw; "insufficient evidence, " says Capt. 
Dugan of the Boston police; "police blunders," declare 
the newspaper men who have worked on the cases. 

"A casual glance over the records discloses fifteen 
murders which have never been traced down. The 
cases date from the Borden murder in 1892 at Fall 
River, one of the most celebrated in police history, to 
three recent cases at Lynn, Randolph and Roslindale, 
lately abandoned by the police." 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 113 

one, in a state of existence where the divine 
wisdom and power assert themselves more 
manifestly and more irresistibly. 

150. To deny either Grod or the after 
life is to maintain that there is no retrib- 
utive justice other or higher than the blind 
and incapable justice which prevails in this 
world, and to maintain, furthermore, that 
by far the largest part of the crime and 
wrong perpetrated upon this earth not only 
escapes all punishment but passes on trium- 
phant and prosperous to the end. 

151. Another consideration maybe here 
suggested. As, on this earth, vice goes 
often through life seemingly victorious, so, 
on the other hand, are virtue and innocence 
frequently downtrodden and oppressed. 
The same innate sense of justice which is 
within us, and which excites so earnest a 
desire on our parts that crime should be 
exposed and punished, makes us sorrowful 
and sympathetic when we see our fellows 
suffering, without fault on their part, or 
when we behold them unjustly dealt with 
in any way. But are not these distressful 
conditions very prevalent among men? 
Should we be satisfied to believe that in all 

8 



114 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

such cases the evil is absolutely without 
remedy or repair, that it is one of the un- 
avoidable conditions of human existence? 
Should we not be willing, on the contrary, 
to accept the honorable and consoling belief 
that, not only will the oppressor in every 
instance be exposed and chastised, but like- 
wise the honest victim shall be ever justified 
and rewarded? And how can such happy 
and glorious results be possibly attained 
except by divine intervention; and where 
are we to witness their accomplishment, if 
it be not in some future state of existence? 
152. And pain, and suffering, physical 
and mental, and death: what philosophy 
has materialism to suggest with regard to 
all or any of these? Upon the theory that 
the final vocation of every man is to merit 
heaven by correct living upon this earth, 
that in this way the celestial kingdom may 
be peopled, we can understand both ter- 
restial life and terrestial death. But, if it 
be not that death is only a new and higher 
birth, what need at all for it among men? 
As a mere occupant of this sphere, a mere 
breather of earth's atmosphere, a consumer 
of food and drink, was not Adam as satis- 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 115 

factory as any among the billion and a half 
of human beings, constituting the present 
total of this world's inhabitants? And, if 
the mere filling of this world with popula- 
tion was all that human life involves, would 
not this planet of ours have been more 
speedily filled had no man ever died that 
was born upon it? 

153. If there be no God and no future 
and eternal existence, why should we mor- 
tals, during the comparatively few days 
which are ours upon this earth, be made or 
allowed to suffer such severe pains of body 
as are from time to time visited upon us? 
Why are there beds of sickness, why such 
frequent need for the surgeon's knife? And 
the breaking of hearts, the oppressions of 
souls; who is there in this world that 
escapes them entirely? Has skepticism any 
reasonable solution for the enigma of their 
continuous visitations among men? 

154. Accept Christian revelation and 
the light breaks at once through this mys- 
tery and through the further ones of in- 
dividual temptation, of the existence of evil 
upon earth. Primitively, man was perfect, 
according to his kind, but by original sin 



116 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

his nature, both physical and spiritual, has 
been weakened and debased. That death, 
through which we all must pass, the suffer- 
ings we must all endure, are consequences 
of this loss and deterioration; they are just 
and persisting penalties for the first great 
offense of human kind. They evidence 
plainly and in perpetuity the divine re- 
probation of evil and serve as a partial 
satisfaction of the divine Justice. Further- 
more, they are salutary means afforded, by 
which individual men, through the merits 
of Christ, may by penance overcome the 
evil consequences of the primal fall, and 
restore themselves to salvation. 

155. Were there no toleration whatso- 
ever by G-od of evil on this earth, how could 
the soul exercise, and at the same time 
make manifest, the liberty it possesses, by 
adhering freely to either the right or the 
wrong? Were there no sufferings in this 
life, no temptations, no trials, how could 
human virtue assert and prove itself and so 
gain the very great reward which has been 
divinely promised to it? x 

1 Sentiment, or feeling, may not constitute or 
afford a direct argument, but it is entitled to weight in 
shaping the conclusions of men. Where reason does 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 117 

156. Professed Atheists and Agnostics 
are, many of them, in discussion, the most 
arrogant of men. It might be imagined 
from the tenor of some of their utterances 
that they possessed all the wisdom and 
good judgment in the world ; that to them 
belongs the high privilege of leading modern 
thought; that the one great evidence of 
shallowness is to differ from them, and 
especially to so differ in behalf of a Faith 
which has claimed in the past the allegi- 
ance of the best minds, and which in this 

not positively condemn its suggestions, the judgement 
not only may, but should be governed by them. Pat 
otism impels us fairly to serve our country in time C ' 
war, without questioning too closely whether she be an 
aggressor, or aggrieved; and it influences us to give 
faith to those versions of historical events which are 
most creditable to our own. It may be a sentiment 
which leads so many among us to hope and believe 
that death does not sever eternally the ties of love and 
friendship which hold hearts together upon this earth, 
but it is a sentiment which true men should wish 
verified. Has Atheism, or Agnosticism any sufficient 
reason to advance to the sorrowing mother, which 
shall persuade her to cease looking forward with a 
confident hope to meeting again in a future life the 
child she has loved and lost ? Must it not be ever a 
black indictment against materialism, that it claims 
the certain severance of every earthly bond, however 
dear and sweet it may be ; that it gives indeed to deat^ 
a sting, and to the grave a victory? 



118 TH£ LIGHT OF FAITH. 

day still rallies about it the majority of the 
truly intelligent and more thoroughly 
educated in the civilized lands. So bold 
are they in their claims, and so insolent and 
intolerant are they of opposition, that they 
have impressed upon many of the unthink- 
ing the idea that they hold absolute mastery 
in the field of debate. Sad and grievous 
mistake! The certain facts and the solid 
arguments are upon our side ; the flights of 
fancy and the figments of imagination upon 
theirs. Indeed, the theories concerning 
which they indulge in such a sounding of 
loud trumpets have not even the merit of 
novelty or of having originated with them- 
selves. They are nothing more then scrap- 
ings from the garbage heap of exploded 
pagan philosophies. Evolutionists and 
physicists should recognize as early apos- 
tles of their creed, Epicurus, Lucretius, and 
others among olden heathens, who pro- 
pounded, centuries ago, in one shape or 
another, the hypotheses which the mass of 
so-called free-thinkers consider the latest 
things out, as well as the most sensational. 
As these theories lived once before, and for 
a time flourished, but vanished at last in 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 119 

the clear sunlight of Christian truth, so 
shall they fare again in this their modern 
resurrection. 

157. Even the civilized and educated 
man may for a time be captivated by seem- 
ing novelty, but his reason, in the end, 
must assert itself. The line of march of 
our Christian Faith, through the centuries, 
is strewn with the corpses of dead systems 
and theories, which sought to antagonize 
Christian truth. Let us be convinced that 
these revivified corpses of godless evolution 
and of materialism will, ere many more 
decades have gone by, sink once more into 
their dishonored graves. 



THIRD LECTURE. 

BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 

Which is the Light and which the Darkness: 

which ennobles man, which degrades him: 

which is our Hope and which our Despair ? 

158. We read in the first chapter of 
Genesis, "and God said, be light made. 
And light was made." 

Before the going forth of this divine 
fiat, this same sacred authority informs us, 
all was "darkness upon the face of the 
deep." 

159. All of this refers, of course, to the 
material light, with which the myriad suns 
interspersed through space are flooding the 
universe. But, there is another world be- 
sides the world of matter ; there is the world 
of intelligence, which is the world spiritual. 
In this latter world, also, there is light and 
darkness; the light of comprehension, and 
the darkness of ignorance and misapprehen- 

(120) 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 121 

sion. The light of this second and higher 
world comes originally from the same 
source, and none other, as does that which 
shines throughout all material space. 

160. To illumine the world of intel- 
ligence, this spiritual world, God has 
established two suns: one of which is the 
natural understanding, and the other 
revelation. The former is sufficient for 
the requirements of man, so far as his 
merely material or physical nature is con- 
cerned, with its fleeting life upon this 
earth ; the latter is essential to him for the 
true life and well-being of that higher and 
spiritual self, which is imperishable. 

161. The one, by its honest employ- 
ment, is capable of building up and extend- 
ing a true secular science; the other has 
given to us that highest and most import- 
ant of sciences, Religion. 

162. It is not the primary mission of 
Religion to inculcate worldly science; but 
the unity of truth is so absolute, as to 
render it impossible that Religion and 
secular science should progress upon lines 
absolutely apart and distinct. Since, how- 
ever, mediately or immediately, they both 



122 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

come from one and the same source, there 
can be no real conflict between them. True, 
some men proclaim a conflict between what 
it pleases them to designate science and 
Religion; or between science and Religion, 
as they misconstrue or misrepresent the 
latter. In all such cases, however, we will 
find, either that the imagined conflict is due 
to erroneous interpretations of Religious 
teaching, or else to the fact that, what some 
people venture to call science is mere spec- 
ulation, and not actual disclosures from 
nature ; mere bold assumptions which never 
have been proven and never will be. 

163. We can remember what took place, 
when, almost in our own day, the science 
of geology came into general and popular 
favor. How many and bold were the 
declarations, that the lessons taught by the 
rocks absolutely contradicted the book of 
Genesis, and overthrew its authority. How 
from all sides came the confident announce- 
ment that now, at last, nature's own voice 
was heard, and that it must silence forever 
the deceiving voice of Revelation, which 
had so long been deluding mankind. 

164. All of this, it is needless to remind 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 123 

ourselves, was based upon a by no means 
obligatory interpretation of sacred Scrip- 
ture, which took the expression, translated 
"day" in our English versions, where the 
creation of the world is described, as neces- 
sarily referring to the period of twenty- 
four hours. Of course, there was no war- 
rant for the arbitrary acceptance of the 
word in this limited sense and no other. 
Even in our own vernacular, the term 
"day" may be and is often used as the 
synonym of "period"; and, although it 
must have been easy for the Omnipotent 
God to make all this Universe in six actual 
days, yet, if it seems to us Christians right 
to consider the work as having progressed 
slowly through six ages, each of enormous 
duration, there is nothing in holy Scrip- 
ture to forbid. 

165. On the other hand, the theory of 
godless evolution, advanced so boldly and 
with such seeming confidence by its up- 
holders, rests solely upon arbitrary assump- 
tions, and is supported by no arguments 
that can reasonably be accepted as con- 
clusive. In its pathway stand several im- 
passable gulfs, over which its advocates 



124 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

have never been able fairly to pass, and 
never will be. 

166. We are asked to accept these the- 
ories, because, it is declared, they are in 
harmony with very many of the phenomena 
of nature. The principle involved in this 
method of reasoning is not unsound in it- 
self, for, any theory, pretending to account 
generally for all that we see, would, if true, 
serve as a universal key, unlocking the 
secrets of all being. The difficulty with 
atheistic evolution is the many missing links. 

167. The number of natural phenomena 
is so immensely great, and their diversity 
such, that any theory, however wild, can be 
made to harmonize, to some extent at least, 
with a certain number of them. But, a false 
theory must encounter a number of such 
phenomena, and especially the more im- 
portant ones, which antagonize it. In the 
case of infidel evolution, the patient study 
and the great ingenuity of its champions 
have been able to marshal a considerable 
number of nature's manifestations, with 
which they claim their favorite theory to be 
in accord. But, these same particular 
phenomena are all in strictest harmony 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 125 

with the Christian dogma of the Almighty 
Creator, operating either by immediate 
and special creative acts, or by the slower 
method of gradual development. Beyond 
these are a class of phenomena, occupying 
the first rank as to importance, which can- 
not be explained upon principles, atheistic 
in their character. The impassable gulfs 
in the way of this extreme evolution theory 
of which we are hearing so much, are gulfs 
which can never be spanned by demonstra- 
tion. But, the friends of the theory are in 
no wise abashed by trifles such as this. 
Across these chasms they deftly cast the 
bridges of imagination and of confident 
prophecy. They do not hesitate to an- 
nounce that, if only all were fully under- 
stood, we would find no breaks whatever ; 
and they are profuse of promises that at 
some time shortly, science will close them 
all. 

168. Accepting the premises of our op- 
ponents, we believers maintain that the 
true solution of the problem of the forma- 
tion of the universe should harmonize with 
all the observed phenomena of nature. We 
confidently proclaim that the account of the 



126 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

creation given by Revelation does harmo- 
nize with the visible phenomena of nature ; 
and, furthermore, we declare that Revela- 
tion alone can satisfy this requirement. 
Other creeds and superstitions have at- 
tempted to account for the origin and 
government of the universe; but these all 
are either absurd upon their very faces, or 
else science has demonstrated their utter 
falsity. On the other hand, the Christian 
dogma, established by a Revelation vouch- 
safed thousands of years ago, long before 
the telescope or the spectroscope were 
invented, long before men knew ought of 
geological science, has withstood successfully 
the fire of the sharpest scientific criticism. 
There is indeed a coterie of unbelievers to 
proclaim untiringly their pretended conflict 
between science and revelation, and this 
with an assurance, also, which might be 
expected, had they not an opponent, to con- 
tradict them. But despite their confidence 
and persistence they have failed utterly to 
convince the Christian and enlightened 
world, and failed even to persuade the great 
body of scientific observers. Mivart, Pas- 
teur, Farraday, Beale, Stokes, Dana, and a 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 127 

multitude of others, at least the peers of 
those composing the unbelieving school, 
have failed to discover anything of the 
fancied conflict. 

169. The chief debate between faith and 
disbelief arises when we come to the con- 
sideration of the spiritual world. Faith 
maintains that there is something more in 
being than mere matter and physical force ; 
a higher and nobler nature, or order, not 
only above matter, but essentially indepen- 
dent of it ; an order to which alone belong 
intelligence and will as special attributes. 
Atheism, on the other hand, denies this 
second and higher order, contending that 
there is but one order of being, which, it 
says, is the material, or strictly natural. 

170. It is not the purpose of this dis- 
course, to enter into any elaborate refuta- 
tion of infidel theories in this connection. 
Its aim is rather to compare these opposing 
theories, and show upon general principles 
which does the more simply and com- 
prehensively solve the many and varied 
problems, which nature presents. 

171. In the first place, the Christian 
dogma of a spiritual and supreme Being 



128 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

accounts the more simply, and at the same 
time most satisfactorily, for the origin and 
continued preservation of all the Universe. 
Grodless evolutionists claim that the Uni- 
verse was originally a nebulous mass ; that 
it heated and cooled, and under the opera- 
tion of blind forces broke up into suns, 
planets and satellites, such as we now be- 
hold them, so stupendous and so exquis- 
itely balanced in the heavens; that it 
developed further, with time, into living 
forms, also, and continuing on, brought 
forth, eventually, intelligence, genius, 
thought, passion, sentiment, etc. All of 
these wonderful transformations and devel- 
opments, they declare, took place without 
the concomitance of design, and without 
intelligent direction of any kind. Some, it 
may be proper to say, contend that all they 
are striving for, is to demonstrate that this 
is a possible and even a probable way of 
accounting for the origin and development 
of things. This latter position, not less 
than the other, is a denial of Grod; for it 
proceeds upon the theory that His existence 
and Providence are not demonstrated by 
nature, and that they are in reality not 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 129 

essentials in the process of determining the 
origin of things. 

172. In preceeding lectures we have dis- 
cussed the insuperable difficulties lying in 
the way of such a theory ; we have demon- 
strated how utterly impossible it is, for in- 
stance, to concede that the living has 
developed of itself from the non-living; or 
the intelligent and thinking from the ab- 
solutely non-intelligent. In other words, 
we have demonstrated how impossible it is 
for us to accept a suggestion that there has 
been an enormous ascension, self-operated, 
from the extremely simple to the highly 
complex, from the unformed and imperfect 
to the formed and perfect. 

173. Such a contention is in accordance 
neither with reason nor experience. The 
perfect, in some form, must precede in order 
the imperfect ; unless we wish to admit that 
without extraneous influence, or aid, the im- 
perfect can perfect itself: a task as difficult, 
it would seem, as for a thing to create itself. 
Water runs down hill, not because of any 
inherent quality of its own, but for the 
reason that, by so doing, it is responding to 

the attraction of gravitation. No preven- 
9 



130 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

tion is necessary in order to restrain it from 
flowing up an incline. Inertia, which is 
called a property of matter, is but the ob- 
served prevalence of a great principle or 
law, that matter cannot of itself change any 
of its conditions, and much less improve 
them. Matter, entering into a living body, 
does not cease to be by its own nature inert, 
any more than the ball, when the bat strikes 
it, can be said to take on an activity of its 
own. The restlessness of matter, when it 
has entered into the composition of a living 
body is the result of some force or power, 
not an essential concomitant of matter it- 
self, but acting upon and controlling the 
material atoms of the living form, as gravi- 
tation acts upon and moves the atoms of 
water, while it is forcing them down the 
hill. This principle, or force, disappears 
from the body at death ; but it leaves behind 
all that is material, the latter unaltered and 
unimpaired, until decomposition intervenes. 
174. It is and must be the same with 
nature in general. Chaos could not of itself, 
and without original design and exterior in- 
tervention, have wrought itself into a sys- 
tem and order; the non-living could not 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 131 

have lifted itself up to the higher plane of 
the sensitive ; nor could the merely sensitive 
have endowed itself with the sublime gift of 
intelligence. The beast could never elevate 
itself to the immensely higher stage of the 
human kind. 

175. Accept , however, the dogma of the 
being of Grod, and the great problems of 
nature are all solved immediately. The 
Omnipotence of Grod absolutely accounts 
for the stupendous character of the visible 
Universe, and gives entire explanation of 
the origin of the mighty forces we see in 
play about us. An infinite Intelligence 
gives reason for the marvelous design crea- 
tion displays, and which no amount of 
sophistry can conceal, or darken. 

176. There is one determinative question 
to which Atheism can make no answer 
whatever, satisfactory or unsatisfactory. 
This is a wonderful Universe of which we 
form part: consider it in its sublime en- 
tirety, or study it in its myriads of complex 
details, it is equally admirable. Now, what 
is all this for? What useful purpose is sub- 
served by the enormous and long continued 
effort expended in bringing the present 



132 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

beautiful system out of the original nebula? 
To any one but an Atheist it is unconceiv- 
able that a work, accomplished evidently 
according to a fixed plan, should be due to 
an unintelligent cause. And it is equally 
inconceivable that an intelligent cause, or 
agent, could act without a preconceived 
purpose. If there was no design, no direct- 
ing power in the creation of the Universe, 
there could have been no purpose either, 
for purpose as well as design imply intel- 
ligence. And, in that case, we may ask 
why the original nebula was not as desirable 
as the elaborate complexity we now behold. 
And if, among this present world's inhabit- 
ants, there are none gifted with immortal 
souls; if all living individuals, without ex- 
ception, are to perish and be resolved anew 
into inanimate matter, whence and to whom 
comes any definite or permanent advantage 
from the luxury of diversity and complexity 
in the living forms we see around us? Some 
unbelievers tell us that it is a beautiful and 
inspiring thing to live and labor for the 
happiness of humanity in the future. But 
this is a piece of sheer sentimentality ; for, 
what is humanity but a mere abstraction. 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 133 

apart from the human units that compose 
it? And if death makes a nothing of each 
one of these units, and generation after 
generation disappears utterly and forever, 
why should he, who to-morrow will be 
nothing, care for those who, in the course 
of time, will be called into existence, only 
to fall back promptly, like himself, into the 
abyss of nothingness? 

177. Man enters upon the wilds of 
nature, clears and cultivates the earth, and 
establishes his home. But, strike out the 
idea of the uses to which he is to apply it, 
and in what respect is the cleared space 
preferable to the one which had been 
cumbered with trees and brush, or covered 
with swamp water? The man of wealth, 
of culture and of refined tastes, may set out 
a tract or plot, embellish it with trees and 
shrubbery, and with beautiful stretches of 
velvet lawn, and plant it around with ex- 
quisite flowers of every variety. He intends 
we know to make use of it: he laid it out 
with a purpose in view, his own recreation 
and delight and those of others. No one 
acts without a purpose and the means one 
employs to carry out such a purpose are 
proportionate to its dignity and importance. 



134 THF LIGHT OF FAITH. 

178. Passing from illustration to actu- 
ality: why, upon atheistic grounds, do the 
stupendous suns interspersed through space 
pour forth their floods of glorious light into 
the immensities around them? Why has 
this earth , with all its splendor, all of its 
wonderous beauty, smiled during the ages, 
up through the depths of space, unfathom- 
able and awful? Why has man been brought 
forth from the original nebula, to show 
himself for so brief a period amid the trees 
and rocks, and among brother brutes; to 
live and labor and suffer, only to vanish 
again from the face of the earth forever? 

179. Atheism is powerless to reply to 
these solemn questions; but Christianity 
stands ready to answer them all, to the full 
satisfaction of reasonable minds. 

180. Very selfish, indeed, would be the 
man, who, possessing an inexhaustible fount 
of healing waters, should keep its existence 
secret, and be the only one to draw benefit 
therefrom. Unworthy, exceedingly, would 
be the being, who could live in the enjoy- 
ment of every happiness and all prosperity, 
and yet have not a single care for the 
many, whose lot condemns them to unceas- 
ing toil and countless privations. 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 135 

181. Can we believe that God, Who, as 
the infinite Perfection, must be infinitely 
glorious and the very supremeness of beauty, 
refuses to make any disclosure of His sur- 
passing glory, of His infinite beauty, to the 
intelligent beings He has created? 

182. Sorrow and suffering are marks of 
infirmity. If our own hearts are so often 
crushed under the weights that are upon 
them, it is due to the fact that our infirm 
natures cannot rise to a full and practical 
comprehension of the fact that trials, how- 
ever sore and heavy, like the joys of earth, 
are transitory, and that, patiently borne, 
they must bring forth eventually fruits of 
joy and gladness. If our bodies ache, it is 
because of defective physical constitution, 
or of agencies interior, or exterior, pressing 
upon our weakness. The stronger the in- 
dividual man is, physically and spiritually, 
the less are there for him of aches and 
pains, and of mental anguish, and the 
nearer his state to the ideal one of the 
highest human happiness. 

183. G-od, being Absolute Perfection, is 
above all infirmity, and is infinitely happy 
as well as infinitely glorious. Are we to 



136 THE LIGTH OF FAITH. 

think Him so ungenerous, as to desire posit- 
ively no sharers in His happiness? 

184. No! in His infinite Goodness, God 
has clearly manifested to us His Omnipo- 
tence, His Wisdom, His Mercy. He has 
written them, with His myriad suns, in 
letters of fire, across the face of the fir- 
mament. He has spread evidences of them 
over the surface of this orb upon which we 
live; He has stamped them indestructibly 
upon the body, and particularly on the soul 
of man. There they stand, the resplendent 
manifestations of His Majesty and Power, 
for angels and men to wonder at and ad- 
mire. 

185. No, again! God has not been con- 
tent that His own infinite bliss should have 
no sharers. He has created the angels, 
called from the beginning to constitute His 
heavenly court, and be partakers of its un- 
speakable and imperishable beatitude. He 
has created us men with souls immortal, 
and made us, also, heirs and destined cit- 
izens af that same heaven. 

186. Oh the glorious disclosure, which 
Christian Faith thus makes, casting a full 
flood of light upon the entire order of crea- 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 137 

tion: revealing to us a most exalted pur- 
pose, worthy of the infinite wisdom and 
goodness of the Creator. 

187. Homer tells of the Cimmerians, 
dwelling "beyond the Ocean Stream/' 
where the sun never shines, and perpetual 
darkness reigns. Our atheist friends are, 
in their way, Cimmerians, living in the dark 
country of godless evolution and general 
disbelief. A difference, however, is that the 
olden mythical Cimmerians were not ac- 
cused of themselves bringing about the 
darkness in which they were immersed, or 
of excluding, by their own exertions, the 
light of day. 

188. Our unbelieving friends, on the 
other hand, by preference, inhabit the dark 
places of infidel speculation, shutting out 
the radiant light of Faith, which alone can 
illumine the mysteries of nature. 

189. Even were we to withdraw all other 
objections to the theory of godless evolu- 
tion, its very complexity and involvement 
would, through comparison, be fatal to it. 

190. The poet tells us "the greatest 
truths are the simplest. ? ' Indeed, truth is 
simplicity itself. Other things equal, among 



138 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

various solutions to any problem, that one 
which is the least complex will be the one 
which is presumably correct. We have, 
in these lectures, followed the theories of 
extreme evolutionists. We have seen how 
they conceive eternal matter in an original 
nebula, or mass of super-heated gas. We 
have seen how an eternal force is required, 
or eternal forces; how eternal force and 
eternal matter are to be brought together ; 
how heat and gravitation are to contend 
against each other, and tear this nebula to 
pieces ; how the fractions are to condense 
and cool and form the heavenly orbs all, 
and put them in motion ; how the great ad- 
justment of orbs and equilibrium is to be 
brought about by blind force, and without 
design; how life is to spring from non-life, 
which is a giving of what is not possessed ; 
how the vegetable is to transform into the 
animal, and finally how reason is to appear 
upon the scene; how the ape, at last, or one 
of his close progenitors, rather, is to develop 
and perfect himself, until he stands forth a 
man, with all the noble gifts which man 
possesses. This is surely involvement of 
the worst type : supposition piled upon sup- 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 139 

position, impossibility upon impossibility, 
mountain high. 

191. On the other hand, how absolutely 
simple is the solution Revelation presents. 
God is from all Eternity: He, Omnipotent 
and All-wise, has made the material Uni- 
verse; He has established the organic, or 
living kingdom; He has created man, and 
made him to His own image and likeness, 
whence man's immense and otherwise inex- 
plicable superiority over all other earthly 
creations. 

192. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, " 
says the poet Keats, in his Ode on a Grecian 
Urn. This is a wise utterance: let us apply 
it as a test to the Christian teaching of a 
spiritual world with the Deity as its climax. 

193. We begin by calling attention to 
the characteristics which mark what may be 
called the progression of nature. There are 
in the line some few enormous breaks, or 
gaps: such are those between the living 
and the non-living, and between man and 
the brutes. Outside of these, however, the 
progression is always and everywhere grad- 
ual, and along extended and not always 
distinct lines. After we have crossed the 



140 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

very clear demarcation between life and non- 
life, we find it in certain of the lower forms 
extremely difficult to distinguish the animal 
from the vegetable. Of course, among the 
higher forms of both kingdoms, this diffi- 
culty does not present itself; but the fact 
remains, all the same, that it is no easy task 
to draw positive and exact distinctions be- 
tween the two. So, from lower forms in 
each kingdom itself to the higher, the 
ascension is slow and measured. The 
animal kingdom is above the vegetable; 
but, even within each kingdom, it is often 
difficult to draw definite lines. There are 
animals of warm blood, like the whale, 
whose home is in the ocean deeps, and 
fishes, on the other hand, which travel by 
land, and are even said to climb trees. 
There are winged animals, such as the bat; 
and birds, such as the penguin and the 
ostrich, which cannot fly at all. 

194. Intelligence appears first in the 
animal kingdom, and constitutes its chief 
excellence. It rises likewise by slow de- 
grees, through many forms, until, in certain 
of the nobler brutes such as the horse, the 
dog, the elephant, it attains to the highest 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 141 

development possible for the brute creation 
to reach. Here conies another of those 
great gaps, marking the ending of one order 
of being, and the beginning of another. On 
one side, what is a mere semblance or 
shadow of intelligence ends ; on the other, 
true intelligence begins with man, the apex 
of visible animate creation. Among men 
are very many degrees or grades of under- 
standing, from that of the rude savage, 
ranging his native forests, to the simple 
and unlettered peasant of civilized lands, 
and upward still to those gifted with intel- 
lects of highest natural power, and still 
further elevated and strengthened by educa- 
tion and culture. 

195. Despite, however, the greatness of 
human power and the nobility of human 
intelligence, that power and that intel- 
ligence are limited. Compared with the 
power and intelligence which all creation 
shows, the capacities of man are infinites- 
imal. 

196. In other words, what an infinite 
distance between the power and intelligence 
which have built a Universe, and the power 
and intelligence of man, whose greatest 



142 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

works are as atoms compared even with 
this one and comparatively small orb upon 
which we live. 

197. We can and must conceive a king- 
dom of Intelligence. Is man the solitary 
denizen of that kingdom under God? We 
can picture to ourselves what may be called 
the space of intellect. Is all that immensity 
of intellectual space, above man and beneath 
God, absolutely unpeopled? 

198. Here Christian dogma, beautiful and 
harmonious, comes in. Man is not the last 
and highest of the intelligent or spiritual 
creation. On the contrary, he is the first 
step only, in the glorious stair-flight of 
ascending intelligence, which leads to the 
highest heavenly places, those nearest to 
the Eternal Throne of God. He is the con- 
necting link, as it were, between the two 
great kingdoms, the spiritual and the an- 
imal. His body joins him to the one, his 
soul incorporates him into the other. Thus 
is the general plan of creation adhered to ; 
a plan which, dividing clearly und unmis- 
takably the different orders of being, is yet 
in no other respect abrupt, and is nowhere 
sparing in the number and variety of forms 
exhibited. 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 143 

199. How sublime, how beautiful is this 
conception, or rather this Christian truth! 
Above man, 1 rising tier upon tier in ascend- 
ing superiority, the resplendent ranks of 
spiritual beings: Angels, Archangels, Prin- 
cipalities, Powers, Virtues, Thrones, Domi- 
nations, Cherubim and Seraphim; but, still 
above all, infinitely, God. Ah, had we not 
the warrant of Revelation for accepting this 
glorious conception, its very sublimity, the 
consolation with which it is freighted should 
commend it to us as absolute truth. 

200. Evolutionists select the natural 
phenomena which they claim to be explain- 
able in accordance with their fancies. How 
many there are, for which their theories 
offer not even the semblance of a solution? 

201. Consider the character of man: what 
an intermingling of the noble with the base, 
of the virtuous with the criminal! The 
same humanity which presents to us the 
Sisters of Charity, or a Florence Nightin- 
gale, ministering in a hospital, presents 
also the heartless usurer, devouring the 

1 Of course we are here dealing with man in his 
natural or earthly state. We are not considering or 
discussing his rank or state in the future and eternal 
life. 



144 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

substance of the poor. It shows, side by 
side, a George Washington and a Benedict 
Arnold; it brings forth the Christian mar- 
tyr, laying down his life in testimony of 
his faith, the zealous missionary, consum- 
ing health, energy and life itself in the ser- 
vice of savage tribes, still sitting in the 
shadow of death ; and at the same time the 
atrocious murderer Deeming, whose victims 
were wives and children ♦ 

202. How can it be, according to evolu- 
tionist ideas, that human nature developed 
from nebula, with such absolutely antagon- 
istic characteristics ingrained, as it were, in 
its very substance? The blind physical 
forces must have driven it in two opposite 
directions at one and the same time ; to- 
wards virtue, and towards vice. Q-ood and 
evil are opposite as the poles : has evolution 
produced them, and by one and the same 
process? 

203. On the other hand, how fully in 
accordance with the facts is Christian Doc- 
trine, in this particular connection, as well 
as in all others. Man, in Adam and Eve, 
first parents of the human race, was created 
originally innocent and virtuous, but with 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 145 

free will. That free will was given, in pur- 
suance to the original design of making 
man according to the divine image and like- 
ness : that is of endowing him with a spir- 
itual, immortal soul, adorned with the gifts 
of intelligence and freedom of will. The 
principal and highest province of human 
free will was to choose God, as the Supreme 
G-ood; and adhere to Him faithfully; to 
accept and practice virtue, and to refrain 
from vice. This glorious gift of free will 
elevated man to the high dignity of co- 
operator with Grod, in the noble work of 
accomplishing his own salvation : and Grod 
Himself, respecting the liberty He had 
given, refuses to coerce man even into being 
saved. 

204. Free to choose between the good 
and evil, in other words subject to tempta- 
tion, our first parents unfortunately yielded 
and, accepting evil, corrupted their nature. 
This nature, we, their progeny, have in- 
herited; a nature originally innocent, but 
perverted by sin. Aided now by Divine 
grace, especially upon solicitation by prayer, 
man is able to overcome the tendency to 
evil resulting from the fall. Does this not 
10 



146 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

account perfectly for the actual state of 
human nature, and the seeming contradic- 
tions in human conduct; this doctrine of 
man, prone to sin by fallen nature, impelled 
to virtue by Divine grace? 

205. Infidels sneer at what they call the 
apple story, disdainfully asking why Adam 
and Eve should be punished merely for 
each taking a bite or two from the side of 
an apple. As though the apple were the 
principal feature in the matter, instead of 
the wilful disobedience to the Divine com- 
mand; a command issuing from the Glod 
who had just created the offenders out of 
the dust of the earth, Who had placed them 
in a garden of delights, requiring of them 
only so slight a sacrifice as a manifestation 
of willing allegiance and grateful obedience 
to the will of their Supreme Creator and 
Benefactor. What would we say of the 
fairness of the man, who, refering to the 
imposition of the penalty of the law upon a 
burglar, should denounce the courts for so 
punishing a man, simply because he had 
gone uninvited into a house which was not 
his own? 

206. But, much as they may seek to 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 147 

ridicule the account of the fall of Adam in 
the Garden of Eden, how otherwise are 
they to be explained, those sore and per- 
sistent temptations, by which the best of 
men are persecuted? How rationally are 
we to account for the strong leaning we, 
every one of us, feel towards some sort or 
sorts of vice, and against which we must 
struggle so persistently and so sternly, if 
we would avoid falling? How are we to 
account for the criminals in the world, 
living side by side with the upright and the 
pure of heart? How are we to account for 
the man who was virtuous yesterday, be- 
coming the sinner of to-day; or for the 
sinner of to-day, turning to repentence and 
to virtue upon the morrow? 

207. Our atheist friends are fond of 
boasting that they have enfranchised human 
reason, and elevated it above what it 
pleases them to term superstition and 
priestcraft. They have done absolutely 
nothing of the kind. On the contrary, they 
have sought to degrade human nature from 
the high place which a Merciful Grod has 
assigned to it, and striven to reduce our 
human intelligence into the slavery of dis- 
honoring error, 



148 THE LIGHT OF FAITH . 

208. Let us compare Christian dogma 
with the black tenets of atheism, in their 
bearing upon the nature and destinies of 
man. 

209. Faith points to the One, Omni- 
potent and Eternal Glod as our Creator and 
Lord: atheism proclaims that we have 
sprung from chaos and nebula, under the 
impulse and action of blind force, and that 
this senseless force still remains our ab- 
solute master. 

210. Faith tells us that we are made to 
the image and likeness of the Infinite and 
most Sublime Q-od, and hence are partakers 
of His Grlory; that Grod created us; that, in 
the words of the penny catechism, fr u we 
might know Him, love Him and serve Him 
in this world and be happy with Him for- 
ever in the next;" that we are the objects 
of His fatherly love and care ; that our in- 
telligence is illumined by His light; and 
that, by our resemblance to Him and our 
glorious destiny, we are invested with an 
especial and most exalted dignity. Dis- 
belief, in lieu of these ennobling truths, 
would convince us that we are only modified 
nebula, condensed gas, or vapor; that the 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 149 

intelligence we show is not our property, 
but is the operation, within us, of physical 
laws; that we can have nothing in the 
nature of personal perfection, since we are 
all no more than fleeting phases of the 
operation of natural forces, within the 
arbitrary limits of natural laws. 

211. Faith tells of Christ Jesus, the 
Second Person of the Ever-adorable Trin- 
ity, Who, assuming the form and nature of 
man, elevated our humanity into closest 
association with the Divinity, made us all 
His brethren, children consequently of Glod, 
and heirs of Heaven. Atheism makes us 
the children remotely of the worm, more 
proximately brethren of the ape : cousins to 
the ring- tailed monkey, the dog-faced 
baboon, and the grotesque chimpanzee. 

212. And the free will to which we have al- 
ready referred, let us not pass over it slight- 
ingly, for it is one of the sublimest gifts, 
conferred by G-od upon man. As Christi- 
anity regards, or defines it, free will is the 
highest development of human liberty, in 
fact it is its very souL Within the deepest 
recesses of our spiritual nature, as in an im- 
pregnable citadel, volition lies entrenched. 



150 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

There is the seat of our true liberty, a 
liberty which extraneous physical power 
cannot coerce, and which, to be subjected, 
must itself effect an ignoble surrender. 
Men may imprison our bodies, and even 
chain our limbs, leaving the will still in un- 
conquerable opposition to their designs. 
They may torture our flesh and crush our 
bones; they may even destroy life itself, 
and under and through ail, our volition 
may remain unconquered. The powers of 
darkness may rage about us, may fiercely 
menace us, and to the utmost persecute and 
afflict us, as in the case of holy Job, and 
yet leave us, as Job was left, final victors 
in the painful struggle. They may spread 
before us the most alluring temptations, as 
did the fiend before our Divine Redeemer 
Himself, upon the mountain top, yet we 
may, with the help of divine grace, say to 
the evil one, calmly, as did our Blessed 
Savior : l ' Begone satan ! ' ' 

213. It is Faith alone which recognizes 
human liberty as it is truly constituted and 
which places it before us in all its real 
sublimity, a soul essentially free within a 
body which may be enslaved ; a soul which 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 151 

wears no chain which it does not rivet upon 
itself, though within a body which may be 
crushed to earth by sheer weight of man- 
acles about it. Atheism denying to man a 
soul ; unbelieving evolution pretending that 
man has a body only, composed of nothing 
higher than mere matter, protesting that 
we are under the dominion of no laws save 
such as are physical, that we have no im- 
pulses or powers essentially different from 
those which move and control matter : what 
does either leave in all this connection, 
which is to the honor and glory of man- 
kind? 

214. Not only as to the state and dignity 
of human nature in this world is the con- 
flict waged between atheism, striving to 
degrade, and Christian Faith to elevate, 
but the battle extends, likewise, to the 
graver problems, arising when we come to 
consider the eventual destiny of man. How 
mightily does disbelief ennoble humanity, 
when it points to the dark and noisome 
sepulchre as our only and last place of rest ; 
when it holds up the grave worm as our 
final conqueror ! A nd Faith — how it de- 
grades our kind, when it declares that 



152 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

heaven , and not the tomb, is the home 
destined to be ours forever ; that the angels 
and saints, and Grod Himself, are to be our 
eternal companions, in the kingdom of un- 
ending bliss, and of glory unfading! 

215. This introduces us to the con- 
sideration of the moral and social condition 
of man. The human race is very numer- 
ous, composed of many nations, and of 
countless individuals. Each nation has his 
own characteristics, and particular condi- 
tions to shape its course and influence its 
destiny. In the same way, individual men 
are of many dispositions, and are in midst 
of particular conditions and circumstances 
which must exert over them great influence 
and even a certain control. 

216. When it comes to judging the state 
or condition of all humanity, at any partic- 
ular time, we are dealing with a subject too 
extended and too complex to be by us 
mastered. How, for instance, shall we of 
this day, hear witnesses upon the actual 
state of every nation in all the world ; and, 
if we could so hear them, which among the 
conflicting testimonies should we be com- 
pelled to credit? How shall we weigh the 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 153 

total of good, in any particular land, against 
the total of evil in the same? How shall 
we place all the nations in the scale, and 
strike, for the whole, the balance of good 
and of evil! Grod only can fathom each 
particular heart, out of the fifteen hundred 
millions and more, upon earth. He alone 
can judge them all in one moment, and say 
whether, on the whole, at any time, virtue 
or vice predominates. 

217. Men are found among us, to main- 
taining that were all human beings rational- 
ists, so-called, the world would be better 
and purer. There are even those inclined, 
in their antagonism towards Christian 
Faith, to laud the old pagan days, when 
Roman emperors were masters of the world. 
Questions of this kind are not easy to be 
determined by testimonial proofs. Our best 
and truest guides in such cases are general 
principles. If there be anything in atheism 
specially calculated to improve the morals 
of men, and anything in Christian belief 
particularly tending to debase them, we 
may fairly conclude that mankind would 
be, in these respects, improved by the 
elimination of Christianity. But, what is 



154 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

there in atheism, which entitles it to be 
considered a force for the suppression of 
vice, and the fostering of good morals? 
Does it appeal to the fears of men, as the 
civil law finds it advantageous, and even 
necessary to do? No, for the virtuous and 
the vicious, with it, fare alike. Does it, on 
the other hand, invoke the strong succor of 
hope, by promising proportionate reward 
to those who, resisting the corrupt inclina- 
tions of nature, adhere perserveringly to 
the right? Not at all! The philanthropist 
and the assassin, according to it, go side by 
side into the dust and there remain. The 
woman, pure and true all the days of her 
life, is consigned to the worms with her 
who has been, throughout, profligate and 
shameless. 

218. Do not tell us that in this world 
there are penalties and rewards, sufficient 
to restrain and to inspire us. These, at 
best, are not the property of atheism; and 
they are not hers to promise, or to admin- 
ister. But, if fear of temporal pains, and 
promise of temporal rewards be effective, 
why should not the fear of eternal punish- 
ment, and the hope of eternal rewards, 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 155 

added, be more effective still? Ah, if the 
majority of men about to commit crime had 
truly before them the idea of the eternal 
perdition awaiting the unrepenting sinners, 
would they not recoil in terror from the very 
thought of wrongdoing? If all men actually 
saw, by the eye of faith, heaven, as Christi- 
anity depicts it, eternally and transcen- 
dency blissful, would not more of them 
labor to attain the prize, by living lives of 
unbroken virtue? If so many men have 
lost the fear of perdition, and abandoned 
hope and thought for heaven, what has 
contributed more to this wretched condition 
than the propaganda of infidelity? 

219. But, is it a fact that, in this world, 
vice is punished and virtue rewarded in 
such way as to strike terror to the heart of 
would-be criminals, or to encourage men to 
endure all rather than transgress the laws 
of morality? To accomplish these salutary 
ends, men must be persuaded that some 
actual and effective law of society provides 
sure punishment for vice and certain reward 
for virtue. 

220. Now what are the punishments of 
this world? The civil law only attempts to 



156 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

deal Avith certain overt offences, and that 
after trial and conviction. The difficulty 
and uncertainty of detection, conviction 
and final imposition of penalty, in many 
countries, are so great as to rob the law of 
its terrors. How many thousands of men 
have been killed, by lynching and other- 
wise, in these United States, without either 
detection or arrests. How many robberies 
and embezzlements and frauds of every kind 
are perpetrated, with no legal punishment 
to follow. And even after convictions, how 
many pardons. 

221. Indeed, the pains and sufferings of 
this life are not restricted to the vicious. 
On the contrary, there is reason for believ- 
ing that the virtuous receive more than their 
proportion. The usurer and the shifty 
tradesman flourish while the victims pine 
in penury; the fraudulent manipulator of 
stocks and bonds grows enormously rich, 
and enjoys a large share of the world's 
respect, while those who have been fleeced 
lapse into poverty, and incur the world's 
contempt. Within the limits which human 
law and police power leaves open, is an im- 
mense margin ; and a multitude of sinners 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 157 

persuade themselves that it is much more 
convenient, if not agreeable, to give reins, 
at least within that compass, to inclination 
and passion. 

222. Consider the heartless husbands 
and fathers, and the faithless wives: how 
does the law reach them for the very griev- 
ous crime of deserting and betraying those 
they should love and cherish? When the 
heart of man, which leans so strongly to 
evil, is stirred by a passion of any sort, 
especially if he be wealthy and powerful, 
what consideration has atheism to present, 
which shall serve to restrain him? 

223. To be strictly and perseveringiy 
virtuous requires a man to be in perpetual 
warfare with himself. Temptation is always 
at his ear, before his eyes, within his heart. 
To what purpose is it, if atheism be true, 
and Christianity false, to engage and per- 
sist in the painful struggle? Since it comes 
to the same in the end, why not waive the 
conflict, and yield to the promptings of 
evil, so far at least as we can do so, without 
imperiling our persons, or impairing our 
fortunes? 

22-4. Ah, how different it is with Chris- 



158 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

tian Faith, in all this matter! What in- 
ducements it holds out to fight the good 
fight from beginning to end ! It proclaims 
a final Justice to be dealt with, which can 
be neither cheated nor bribed; a Justice, as 
potent to reach the mighty despot who fills 
an absolute throne, as to touch the hum- 
blest serf in all his dominion ; a Justice for 
the hidden sin as well as for the open one; 
a Justice for the usurer, the dishonest spec- 
ulator, the robber, the traitor, the sland- 
erer and traducer! Justice for all, without 
favor or distinction ! 

225. Reward, on the other hand, for acts 
of virtue done, for sufferings endured in the 
cause of truth and right! Rewards tran- 
scendent for the struggles of a life-time 
against vicious inclinations, and against the 
instigations to evil, perpetually besieging 
us from without. 

226. Which of these two creeds, atheism 
or Christianity, judged each by what it pro- 
pounds, is better calculated to sweeten 
human sentiment, or purify human morals? 
Can any of us here this evening, after hav- 
ing gone over the grounds, hesitate for an 
answer? 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 159 

227. Let us consider the actual state of 
mankind, with regard to the distribution of 
wealth and general comfort , not to mention 
happiness. Out of all the world's inhabit- 
ants, five hundred millions only, it has been 
estimated, live in houses, seven hundred mil- 
lions in huts and caves, while two hundred 
and fifty millions are shelterless or nearly 
so. Out of all, five hundred millions only are 
well clothed, that is wear proper garments 
of some kind. Seven hundred millions are 
only partially covered, and two hundred 
and fifty millions may be considered un- 
clothed. This means that, of all the world's 
inhabitants, less than one-third are in a 
condition of full physical comfort. 

228. That third, entirely comfortable 
because living in houses and well clothed, 
inhabit this and other lands, more or less 
civilized. We know of our own experi- 
ence how unequally, even among our 
own brethren in this Republic, wealth and 
the good things of life are distributed. The 
few have extra shares, the many are poorly 
endowed. Bad as it is in this respect, in 
our own America, we know that it is worse 
in some old and thickly settled countries, 



160 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

beyond the waters. Furthermore, how 
many are afflicted in soul and body. How 
many orphans fill our asylums ; or, worse, 
are drifting about the streets of our cities. 
How many paupers are in almhouses, or 
hanging upon the verge of life, existing on 
the charities extended them. How many 
lingering, or incurably sick are in our 
hospitals. How many wretched in every 
shape and way, in pain and irremediable 
sorrow there are upon this beautiful earth. 

229. We know by this time, that the 
unequal distribution of wealth, the preval- 
ence of pain, suffering and wretchedness, 
the toiling and anxieties of the masses, are 
inseparable from human life. Anarchists 
believe that, were society as constituted 
destroyed, a new and better social system 
might be built up from the resulting chaos, 
or anarchy. This is a wild as well as a 
criminal dream. So soon as the smoke 
and dust of the awful upheaval would be 
cleared away, and order could be re-estab- 
lished, things would inevitably fall again 
into the same old lines. 

230. What explanation has atheism to 
present for this condition of affairs'? What 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 161 

bond has it to give society, and to humanity 
at large, for the keeping of that peace, 
which, despite the evils accumulating about 
it, is essential to the very life of mankind? 
Be patient ye poor and toiling ones, in- 
fidelity shouts in the ears of the toiling 
masses: you shall soon enjoy the comforts 
of the grave, and the engaging society of 
the consuming worm ! 

231. Ah ye crushed ones of the earth, 
who are sorely moved, like blind Sampson 
among the Philistines in the temple, to 
clasp the pillars which uphold the fabric of 
the State, and bring down all in one ruin: 
stay your hands ! Atheism is here to con- 
sole you with its bright promise, that a few 
more years of patient endurance will bring 
for you the comforting darkness of utter 
annihilation ! 

232. Ah! how differently Christian Faith 
speaks to the lowly, to the oppressed, to 
the wretched in this world. Suffering chil- 
dren, cast not your eyes earthward: look 
up ! See above all this persistent labor and 
enduring turmoil, this misery and want, 
none of which with your noblest efforts you 
may be able to remedy here below; see 

It 



162 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

God, omnipotent and glorious, your bene- 
ficent Creator, and your loving Father? 
Know that, poor as you may be in the 
world's goods, you are rich in the posses- 
sion of an immortal soul, made to the 
image of God! Be confident that, how- 
ever men may despise you here below ; you 
are loved and cherished there above ! Take 
comfort for this life is short, its miseries 
transient ; and it is to be followed by an- 
other, and an unending one, where the 
poor in spirit in this world, and the humble 
of heart, shall sit in the highest seats, and 
be Princes of Eternity. Bear with patience 
the evils you cannot lawfully remedy: they 
are trials laid upon you in the present, that 
your merit and glory may be magnified for 
hereafter! Thus speaks Faith to the toilers, 
and to the oppressed, and her voice lightens 
their burthens, and reconciles them to their 
lot. It lets in the sunshine of hope, where 
otherwise the darkness of despair must 
abide. Thus speaks she to the poor, and 
to the suffering; and, with Faith, there may 
be joy in the midst of grievous poverty, 
and comfort with severest anguish of body. 
233. Why, Oh ye unbelievers! should 
you seek to expel from the human heart 



BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 163 

this glorious and abiding hope? Why- 
should you wish to quench this light, shin- 
ing so resplendently in the sight of the suf- 
fering and the sorrowful? Even were it 
but a delusion, it were better for it to sub- 
sist; better that man should continue de- 
luded by it — deluded into thinking him- 
self, however lowly he may be in this 
world's estimation, yet a son of Grod, heir 
of Heaven, into thinking it worth his while, 
despite all temptations, to be just and vir- 
tuous in this life; into thinking that his 
goal is not the grave, but that a blissful 
and eternal Heaven is. But, how can that 
be a delusion, which so elevates and digni- 
fies human nature, so takes the sting from 
wretchedness, and the poison from out of 
misery? 

234. And, what hast thou to offer, dark 
atheism, in its stead, shouldst thou banish 
from this sad world our Christian hope? 
Bloodshed, riot, destruction for the State; 
gloom, despair, suicide for the individual ! 
Why, if this life be all, should the millions 
toil and suffer? Let them destroy at once 
all, and so escape a bitter and hopeless lot, 
and accomplish at the same time a sweet 
revenge ! Why should there be disappoiijt- 



164 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

ment and sore griefs, even long and trying 
labor, when a grain of poison would place 
us out of reach of all that can afflict? Oh 
preachers of infidelity, hide your heads; 
you who seek to dishonor your kind, to rob 
it of true hope, you who are the active 
apostles of a gospel of degradation, despair 
and suicide. 1 

1 Max Miiller, in his "Origin of Reason,' ' page 
488, furnishes a practical confirmation of the truth of 
the words above employed. He gives the language of 
a lady, who had cast herself into the dread condition 
of utter unbelief. Though this lady's reasoning facul- 
ties so grievously betrayed her in the matter of select- 
ing her premises, they nevertheless enabled her to 
draw the only eventual conclusions which she had left 
open to herself from the premises so adopted. 

"Enjoyment is good," this unfortunate person 
writes, "and frenzy and love are good, but hatred also. 
Hatred answers well when we cannot love. Wealth is 
good, because it can be changed into enjoyment. 
Power is good, because it satisfies our pride. Truth is 
good as long as it pays, but treason is good also if it 
fetches a higher price. Marriage is good as long as it 
makes us happy, but good also is adultery for every 
one who is tired of marriage, or happens to fall in love 
with a married person. Life is good as long as it is a 
riddle ; good is suicide also, after the riddle has been 
guessed. But, as every enjoyment culminates in our 
being deceived and tired, and as the last pleasure van- 
ishes with the last illusion, he only would seem to be 
truly wise who draws the last conclusion of all science, 
i. e., who takes prussic acid and that without delay," 



FOURTH LECTURE. 

REVELATION. 

Its Truth Demonstrable. 

235. Whether or not there is a Divine 
Revelation is one of the gravest problems 
which men are called upon to solve. It in- 
volves the entire issue of formal and organ- 
ized religion and it concerns the eternal 
destiny, or condition, of every individual 
human being. It can, however, arise log- 
ically only after the determination of the 
primary question of Grod's existence and it 
is manifestly vain to discuss it with either 
atheist or agnostic. 

236. Those who deny the being of Glod, 
or His knowableness, deny at the same time 
revelation, on the principle of the part 
going with the whole. And they who 

(165) 



166 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

reject the Creator, expressly, or impliedly 
by holding Him to be unknowable, deprive 
Him of the recognition, adoration, grat- 
itude, love and obedience, to which He is 
rationally entitled from all His intelligent 
creatures. Such as thus repudiate Him 
should reasonably expect to suffer some 
penalty, if, in the end, they discover that 
they are immortal and find themselves be- 
fore the judgment seat of the same Al- 
mighty and infinitely Just Creator, Whom, 
in this life, they have systematically and 
persistently antagonized. And the pen- 
alty, to be in such case expected, should be 
great, if it is to be at all proportionate to 
the gravity of the offence, and the majesty 
of the One offended. 

237. The considerations which follow 
are not addressed to those who deny the 
existence of Grod, but only to those, who, 
while believing in Him, are in doubt with 
regard to revealed truth. The existence of 
Grod being, therefore, taken for granted, let 
us address ourselves to the many other 
grave questions arising, questions which 
every rational being is morally obliged to 
consider, and which he must solve at his 



KEVELATION. 167 

peril. Three of these are particularly per- 
tinent to our present inquiry. Has Grod 
given to man a spiritual revelation? If so, 
what is the nature and purport of that 
revelation? What are the means, whereby 
we are to recognize it? 

238. All of these three questions can 
scarcely be dealt with exhaustively within 
the limits of a single address. It is well, 
therefore, that they are separable. Many 
who agree in an affirmative answer to the 
first, are at variance in regard to the others. 
Indeed, it is necessary to fix upon some 
solution of the first, before we can logically 
consider the second, and to settle for our- 
selves both the first and the second before 
we can deal fully and finally with the third. 

239. We ought not to be embarrassed in 
our study of the first of these three ques- 
tions by our consciousness of the fact that 
men differ with regard to the others ; or in 
our investigation of the second, because of 
disputes concerning the third. Each and 
every one of these successive questions 
must have its own true solution, no matter 
how many there may be who fail to reach a 
right conclusion with respect to one, or 



168 THE LIGTH OF FAITH. 

both, of the other two. For present pur- 
poses, we shall endeavor to deal together 
with the second and third of the questions 
we are about to consider, as, after all, they 
are very closely allied ; and, if we can dis- 
cover what constitutes a true revelation, we 
shall, at the same time, have indicated, to 
some extent at least, the distinguishing 
marks which characterize it. 

240. Is it possible for a Divine, or a 
Supreme Being to exist, without any voli- 
tion of His own? The works of creation 
are sufficient, we maintain, to establish the 
existence of Gk>d. They display an omni- 
potent power, and an infinite intelligence. 
They disclose, at the same time, and neces- 
sarily, a supreme will ; for we cannot con- 
ceive of intelligence without volition. The 
humblest worm, crawling at our feet, 
chooses as best it may the path along which 
it travels. 

241. When we admire the visible uni- 
verse, we can not but recognize in all a 
wonderful plan or design, carefully and 
completely carried out. And, what is the 
accomplishment of any great plan but the 
carrying out of the will of him who de- 
signed it? 



EEVELATION. 169 

242. If it must be conceded that God 
has a will, He must be entitled, as the 
Supreme Ruler of the universe, to have that 
will respected, throughout the realm of His 
own creation. "With regard to things in- 
animate, He has visibly subjected them all 
to Himself. Our sun has its alloted place, 
it does its appointed work in the universe. 
So, also, do the myriad other suns which 
stud the heavens. The planets have their 
courses laid out, and during countless ages 
they have undeviatingiy wheeled their ways 
along them. 

243. The unnumbered species of living 
things, vegetable and animal, have had 
their various purposes assigned to them, 
and these purposes they have unerringly 
fulfilled during the ages past, and the same 
they shall continue to fulfil, until the ap- 
pointed end. Not one of these lower forms 
has true intelligence, or anything which 
can be rightfully considered as such. If 
these inferior creatures possess anything to 
which the term mind may be applied, it is 
of an extremely low degree, and not reach- 
ing, in capacity, beyond what is actually 
requisite for the supplying of physical 
needs, 



170 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

244. But, when we come to consider 
man, the highest in the scale of visible 
creatures, we find true intelligence, or in- 
tellect, hence an unmistakable will. These 
gifts are the consequence of his having 
been made the image and likeness of God, 
Whose intelligence is infinite and Whose will 
is supreme. The fact that man has a will, 
enlightened or at least capable of enlighten- 
ment, does not render him less a creature 
of the same God, who made the rocks, the 
plants and the beasts, or less the absolute 
property of his Creator. The fact that he 
alone of all visible creatures is possessed of 
true intelligence does not take him from 
under the Divine Sovereignty. The sole 
difference which in this respect can exist 
between human beings and all inferior 
animate forms is that, according to the 
limitations of their natures, the latter pay 
blind and inevitable obedience to the Crea- 
tor; whereas man, by reason of his superior 
powers, owes Him a conscious and intel- 
ligent allegiance. 

245. The liberty or free will which man 
enjoys in this world being one of the re- 
sults of his likeness to his Divine Maker; 



EEVELATION. 171 

though men may abuse the precious gift by- 
refusing submission to the Eternal Giver, 
such an abuse must stand under respon- 
sibility. The very possession of this liberty 
imposes upon the creature thus signally 
favored a momentuous choice. He must 
either acknowledge his Maker or reject 
Him ; he must-either submit to the Divine 
Will or rebel against it. And if the solemn 
necessity of making such an election con- 
fronts every reasonable man, how is the 
choice to be made intelligently, or at all, 
unless there be within his reach the infor- 
mation essential for the proper exercise of 
his judgment and for the enlightenment of 
his conscience? How shall the individual 
man fulfil this obligation and choose to ac- 
knowledge his Maker, and to obey the Divine 
will, unless Grod makes to him a sufficient 
manifestation of His attributes and His 
desires; unless, in other words, Grod estab- 
lishes His code of laws and promulgates 
them to the human race? 

246. From these premises the conclusion 
is unavoidable that God has in some suffici- 
ent shape made known to man the fact of 
His existence, and to some extent revealed 



172 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

His attributes; and that He must, likewise, 
have communicated to men His eternal 
designs with regard to human destiny and 
to human conduct. And what, we may 
ask, is a Divine disclosure, along the lines 
suggested, if not that precise revelation for 
which Christianity has ever been contend- 
ing? 

247. By way of instructive illustration, 
we may refer to the relations which should 
exist between parent and child, which rela- 
tion is a faint type of the higher and nobler 
one, established between God and man. If 
the father hide himself forever from his 
child, how shall the child come either to 
know or to love him? If the parent is to 
be obeyed, how is the child to comply with 
the duty thus resting upon him, unless the 
parent give expression plain and precise to 
his wishes? 

248. From all these considerations it 
results clearly that, unless men are indeed 
exempted from all allegiance to God, and 
from all accountability towards Him, there 
must be a Divine Eevelation. To deny its 
existence is to rule God out from the intel- 
lectual and moral concerns of mankind, to 



REVELATION. 173 

cancel Him out, as it were, from the great 
problems of human life and of human 
destiny. 

249. From all appearances the things of 
this world, inanimate and animate, are 
made for man. At all events, he has been 
endowed with powers, which enable him to 
subject them all to his personal service. If, 
therefore, all things on earth lead practically 
up to man ; if man be the very crown of the 
visible creation, is it reasonable to suppose 
that the Sovereign Creator of all things has 
not the slightest concern in the destiny of 
the noblest of His earthly creatures, and 
has no particular design or intent with 
regard to him? 

250. To deny revelation is, therefore, to 
affirm that Grod has in fact no connection 
of any practical sort, either with humanity 
in general, or with individual men. It 
must, from the standpoint of such a denial, 
be of no importance to Him whether men, 
collectively, or severally, are given to the 
practice of virtue or of vice. 

251. The highest destiny of mankind, 
the highest end of the individual man, from 
the point of view of a Divine existence and 



174 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

a Divine Sovereignty over all things, must 
be one of the Almighty Creator's own ap- 
pointing; and it is difficult to conceive how 
the Supreme Master of the Universe, hav- 
ing placed all things else under His laws, 
should have provided no particular way, or 
method for the working out of His own 
plans, with regard to His crowning work, 
upon earth. The fact that man is endowed 
with free will renders human co-operation, 
to some extent at least, a factor in the 
carrying out of the Divine plans regarding 
humanity in general, and requires, also, 
that each individual human being give his 
personal consent to the working out of his 
particular eventual destiny. 

252. That man, in spite of his exalted 
gifts, cannot fathom the thoughts of Grod, 
or comprehend fully His ways, is a proposi- 
tion which agnosticism itself cannot dis- 
pute. It is precisely because the thoughts 
of Q-od are so far above our thoughts, and 
His ways above our ways, that nature, and 
life itself, especially, are full of mystery. 
Even the untutored mind must wonder, 
although it may make no effort at analyzing 
its emotions, or the cause of them. But 



KEVELATION. 175 

among those who possess some degree of 
mental, and especially moral culture, there 
are few if any, who, in their more intro- 
spective moods do not experience this sense 
of the nrystery of all things and do not feel 
its weight upon them. This weight must 
become all but intolerable, at times, to 
those whose spiritual sense is starved by 
the lack of certain and authoritative religi- 
ous beliefs and who can feel no assurance 
as to what awaits them beyond the grave. 

253. This inability of the human mind 
to entirely comprehend the thoughts and 
ways of Grod, to know of itself the destiny 
which Glod has appointed for man, and the 
means and methods He has provided for 
the attainment of that destiny, renders it 
necessary, in order that humanity at large, 
and likewise every individual member of 
our race, be enabled to recognize und pur- 
sue the ways thus divinely appointed, that 
Grod should make known by revelation 
these methods and means. Otherwise, how 
are such methods and means to be known 
and followed by men, collectively and in- 
dividually? 

254. It might, in certain minds, furnish 



176 THE LIGHT OF ^AITH. 

an objection to the idea of revelation in 
spiritual matters, if it could be truly main- 
tained that there is nothing at all similar to 
it, in the merely physical order. On the 
other hand, we are entitled to claim as an 
extremely favorable argument, the fact that 
there is, indeed, even in the visible world, 
that which, rightly viewed, must be con- 
sidered as a physical revelation from Grod. 

255. Christianity teaches that there are 
two orders of created things, the material 
and the spiritual, both from the hand of 
the same Divine Creator. 

256. There is very much, with regard to 
matter, which we do not know, and which 
we shall never know in this life. But how 
is it that we know anything at all concern- 
ing the visible world? It is because we 
have received from Grod a double gift, com- 
mon to all men. He has bestowed upon 
each of us a soul, illumined by the light of 
His own Divine Intelligence and endowed 
with consciousness ; together with the five 
senses, which are the handmaids of human 
intelligence. By the combined action of 
both, we are capable of observing the 
things which go to make up the external 



KEVELATION. 177 

and of becoming acquainted, 
somewhat , with their nature and properties. 

257. But this disclosure to man of the 
world exterior to himself , this presentation 
of material things to the human senses, and 
through them bringing to our consciousness 
and understanding the phenomena of ex- 
ternal creation is effected through the 
medium of light. 

258. "Nor is gravitation/' says the 
Duke of Argyll, in his work, entitled 
"Unity of Nature," Chap. I., p. 6, "the 
only agency which brings home to us the 
unity of conditions which prevail among 
the worlds. There is another: light, that 
sweet and heavenly messenger, which comes 
to us from the depths of space, telling us 
all we know of other worlds, and giving us 
all we enjoy of life and beauty on our 
own." And what is light, after all, but a 
means, in the first place of manifesting 
God's glory, and in the second of convey- 
ing to mankind knowledge, concerning the 
existence and the nature of external things? 
Without it, what could we know of this 
world, of the heavenly bodies, of our own 
immediate environments? 

12 



178 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

259. The things made visible by the 
rays of the sun are to us of material inter- 
est only: they can concern each individual 
human being only during the brief span of 
his mortal existence. What comparison 
can there be between the period of human 
life, even the longest, and the all of eternity 
which lies before us? And it is this coming 
eternity, with which , in the spiritual order, 
we have to deal on the theory of the soul's 
immortality. Hence , in view of the immeas- 
urable difference between eternity and the 
brief stretch of any human life, spiritual 
things should be of far greater moment to 
us than those which are merely temporal. 

260. The question fairly presents itself 
as follows: If the Creator has been so con- 
siderate of our temporal and earthly wel- 
fare, transitory as this is, as to give to us 
light, and since it is by material light that 
the Almighty God enables us to see and 
know the material universe, to know, also, 
the laws by which it is governed, to make 
our way among the material things which 
are about us, to supply all the needs of our 
bodies, and to accomplish the purposes on 
earth of our creation : how can we suppose 



REVELATION. 179 

that He has made no provision for illumin- 
ating the spiritual world, that there too we 
may see and know and make our way, and 
be enabled to use spiritual things for the 
promotion of our own everlasting interests 
and the general welfare of mankind? 

261. What would we say of an educa- 
tional system which began and ended with 
the kindergarten; making elaborate and 
strenuous efforts in behalf of infancy, but 
neglecting entirely youth and manhood? 
Were some stranger brought into some one 
of the wonderfully equipped elementary 
schools of the country, would he not expect 
to be shown later a high school and a uni- 
versity? 

262. Another parallel may be found in 
the nature and the conditions of human 
society. Nations can exist only by virtue 
of the constant exercise of a sovereign 
authority. Be that authority vested where 
it may, in a despot, or in the majority 
of the people, it nevertheless must stand 
above the individual citizen; and, within 
proper limits, it must control him. Its 
fiat compels him to discharge certain civic 
duties, and forces him to abstain from cer- 



180 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

tain civil wrongs. Its authority and power 
punishes him when he proves refractory. 

263. How, it may be asked, could 
human society be at all possible without an 
effective system of legislation, of one kind 
or another? Can we conceive of a well- 
established commonwealth, without an ex- 
press code of laws, and with a government 
resting solely upon the thoughts and con- 
sciences of its individual citizens? 

264. What are the laws of a country but 
a revelation of the sovereign's will to the 
subject? The provisions of our National 
Constitution, declaring this nation to be a 
republic, providing that the sovereign 
power shall be exercised by the three great 
departments, the legislative, the executive 
and the judiciary, are very suggestive of 
the first commandment of the decalogue. 
The penal code under which we live fills, in 
its especial sphere, a role somewhat analog- 
ous to that filled in the spiritual order by 
the ten commandments, together with all 
the other injunctions and prohibitions laid 
down in Holy Writ. 

265. If it be found so indispensable, in 
civil government, that the sovereign should 



KEVELATION. 181 

define and fix the nature and extent of its 
own authority, that it should establish 
agencies for the effective distribution and 
satisfactory exercise of its own powers ; that 
it should promulgate laws, to guide and 
govern the civil conduct of the citizen, is it 
not fair to conclude that Grod has similarly 
made sufficient -provision for the upholding 
of His own sovereignty, and for the preser- 
vation and successful exercise of His own 
supreme dominion? Ought He not for that 
purpose to disclose Himself, expressly and 
formally ; to define with sufficient clearness 
the relations existing between Himself and 
mankind collectively and individually; to 
exhibit His wishes adequately, to the end 
that His rational creatures may have no 
valid excuse for refusing to Him an enlight- 
ened and faithful allegiance? 

266. To deny revelation is to maintain 
that the conditions, which all human ex- 
perience shows to be absolutely essential for 
the establishment and preservation of 
human government, may be entirely dis- 
pensed with in the far more weighty con- 
cern of spiritual living ; that they are need- 
less absolutely in connection with the rela- 



182 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

tions, so supremely important, which exist 
between the Omnipotent and All- wise Crea- 
tor and man, the most favored of His sub- 
jects. 

267. The denial of a Divine revelation 
is, at the same time, a denial, either open 
or implied, of the Divine dominion over our 
rational nature. From the standpoint of 
such a denial, we should have to believe 
that, if a man, determined upon destroying 
himself, should spring from a precipice, the 
material part of him, the body, obedient to 
Grod's law of gravitation, must inevitably 
dash upon the rocks below ; but the spirit- 
ual, the rational part, in which personal 
responsibility is vested, need be at no 
trouble with regard to the solemn question 
as to whether suicide is a sin or not; 
whether God, who placed the rash creature 
in the world and assigned to him some par- 
ticular task therein, was not exclusively en- 
titled to determine the hour at which the 
the burthen was to be laid down ; whether 
there is not a heavy penalty attached to 
such desertion of one's post and such usur- 
pation of the Divine prerogative. 

268. Indeed, established law and formal 



EEVELATION. 183 

government are the only possible preven- 
tatives of social chaos. They are essential 
to the very life itself of human society. The 
same must be said with regard to religion. 
If religion is to be anything at all, if it is to 
be real and tangible, definite, systematic 
and orderly, there must be spiritual laws, 
authoritatively promulgated, and a recog- 
nized governing body, or church. To dis- 
pute this is to contest the possibility of 
both certainty and form in religion, and 
deny to it even the semblance of real author- 
ity. To question revelation is to deny 
that G-od wills that we should confess and 
worship Him ; that He cares for our love ; 
that He is in any way interested in the 
conduct of men, in the aggregate or in- 
dividually; that He has any concern that 
Jesus Christ should be recognized and 
worshipped as His Divine Son and the 
Redeemer of mankind; that He is inter- 
ested in either the acceptance or the re- 
jection of Sacred Scripture, and so on 
through the entire list of problems pre- 
sented by dogmatic and moral theology. 
For, anyone who has the power to supply 
effective means towards the securing of a 



184 THE UGHT OF FAITH. 

particular end and yet refrains from sup- 
plying them, must be held as utterly in- 
different as to the end itself. 

269. The idea that God is thus indif- 
ferent, with regard to the spiritual relation- 
ship between Himself and mankind — that 
He has annulled Himself, in this His own 
world, is rebutted by the fact that He has 
made man what some have termed "a 
religious animal. 7 ' Misguided, debased 
even, as it often is, none the less there is 
an innate propensity on the part of men 
everywhere to worship, to adore; and this 
propensity is so marked, so ingrained, so 
universal, that it can fairly be considered 
one of our human instincts. As the thirsty 
stag is irresistibly impelled to seek for 
water, wherewith to slake its thirst, so 
with equal certainty does the normal man 
turn naturally to worship of some sort. 

270. This instinctive tendency is the 
natural consequence of man's innate sense 
of his own weakness, of his dependence, 
as a contingent being, on a superior, neces- 
sary Power, holding him at its mercy. 
Whether he reasons about it in his own 
mind or not, the feeling is there. He may 



REVELATION. 185 

steel himself against it and resist it habitu- 
ally and successfully. He may argue him- 
self out of all positive belief; he may 
silence the voice of his conscience ; he may, 
even upon his death bed, through a spirit 
of pride or of impious bravado, still deny 
all belief in the Grod who created him; 
but he cannot destroy, though he may 
still disregard it, the haunting fear that 
lurks in the depth of his soul, with ever 
renewed questionings, as to what may await 
him, when he passes out of this world. 
True, practical atheists are only too numer- 
ous, men who live as if they had no belief 
in Grod; but it is a matter of serious doubt 
whether professed speculative atheists are, 
as a rule, so truly destitute of any belief in 
G-od, as they claim to be. And men who 
have succeeded in forcing all belief out of 
their minds are really the exceptions which 
prove the rule. Their state is artificial. 

271. So with regard to conscience, that 
inner sense which distinguishes between 
right and wrong and which inclines towards 
the one and against the other: this faculty, 
likewise, is a natural endowment of the 
human race. True, it may be deadened or 



186 THK LIGHT OF FAITH. 

grossly perverted by brutal living, just as a 
man may disfigure or destroy one of his 
bodily members, but ordinarily, in some 
condition or other, it remains. 

272. Indeed conscience proves often a 
most difficult thing to absolutely eradicate. 
It is not easy to determine when, if ever, 
conscience is entirely dead. Few criminals 
there are, however confirmed in their evil 
ways, who, in their better moments, do not 
experience the scourgings of remorse. We 
have the testimony of De Quincey, to the 
effect that, during the period of his enslave- 
ment to the vice of opium eating, his con- 
science remained alive, and his interior dis- 
position protested continually against the 
excesses into which he fell. 

273. Conceding the power to judge of 
the morality of acts, and the inclination to 
be guided in conduct by such judgments, 
as inherent in the nature of man, and ac- 
knowledging the facility with which it is 
misguided and often nullified, is it not fair 
to assume, in this regard, that, if God has 
any care whatsoever in the matter, He 
would accord to our race some means of 
distinguishing right from wrong, virtue 



EEVELATION. 187 

from vice; that He should fix standards, by 
which right conduct may be measured in 
this world? If music and not discord is to 
result from the performance of an orchestra, 
must not all the instruments be perfectly in 
tune and the players all keep time? And 
if these essential conditions are to be 
secured, can it be done otherwise than by 
conforming to accepted standards, and an 
accepted guidance, as to rhythm and tone? 

274. Of course men as free agents must 
have it in their power, both as nations and 
as individuals, to reject God's revelation, or 
to lose it in whole or part ; but this circum- 
stance furnishes no argument against the 
propositions we are laying down. On the 
contrary, the very enormity of the excesses 
to which many have yielded themselves 
generally, and so often under the influence 
of false creeds, increases the probability of 
G-od's having made some provision for the 
certain moral and religious government of 
the world ; of his having marked out some 
path, along which men of good will might 
journey securely and from which the law- 
less alone would stray. Any provision of 
this sort from the Lord, in whatever form 



188 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

it might be given, would constitute a true 
divine revelation. 

275. Were the existence of such a divine 
revelation universally promulgated and uni- 
versally accepted and acted upon by man- 
kind, history would never have recorded 
the atrocities of the Old Man of the Moun- 
tains and his Assassins, nor the countless 
murders and robberies of the Indian Phan- 
segars, or Thugs, worshippers of Siva ; nor 
the offering up, by their own parents, of 
hecatombs of innocent children upon the 
altars of Baal, or Moloch; nor the in- 
describable obscenities of certain abomin- 
able cults among the pagan Greeks and 
Romans. 

276. Actually, there is but one divine 
revelation, which is the aggregate of all 
that God has ever made known to man, 
concerning spiritual things. But this reve- 
lation has been given in different, or, we 
had better say, in multifarious ways. The 
visible universe is a plain and enduring 
manifestation of the being of God, of His 
Omnipotence and His universal dominion, 
of His mercy and His Providence. From 
the same source we may acquire some idea 



REVELATION. 189 

of man's sonsliip to God, of man's likeness 
to his Maker; and we may infer, also, the 
existence and the immortality of the human 
soul. 

277. But this disclosure, by mere phys- 
ical agencies, of the few basal truths just 
enumerated, is too general in its nature, too 
indistinct, too remote, as it were, to serve 
as the foundation of any sure and adequate 
system of religious belief, even in most 
elementary form. As to the other many 
and great religious truths which are in- 
volved, and which men are no less obligated 
to accept, mere visible nature, of course, is 
dumb. Confining our attention solely, for 
the moment, to the elementary truths 
which nature does unveil, it was necessary, 
in order that they should be clearly under- 
stood and that the purposes of Grod in their 
regard should be more fully accomplished, 
that they should be made more explicit; 
that they should be brought home to the 
individual man ; that they should be clothed 
with the majesty and sanctity of God's per- 
sonal and express promulgation. In this 
way only could it be possible to place men 
under a more positive responsibility for the 
acceptance of these truths. 



190 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

278. All the phenomena we behold in 
creation are, in regard to divine revelation, 
the signs only, given by (rod for a confir- 
mation of the truth of His words, in one 
way out of many. They are, as it were, the 
seals set to the parchment of His law. They 
are corroborative evidences, by which He 
has graciously vouchsafed to confirm the 
direct and express revelation, which He has 
likewise given. 1 

279. Had the Almighty confined Him- 
self strictly to these physical manifestations 
of Himself, and extended and confirmed 
them in no way by His express word, men 
might perhaps have concluded that He had 
no care whatsoever for the thoughts of 
men, individually or in the aggregate, with 
regard even to these fundamental truths of 
natural theology; and that He was not con- 
cerned whether these truths were accepted 

1 We know that this (nature) is not the only reve- 
lation, that tells man of his duties and responsibilities, 
of the celestial sympathy which surrounds him, and 
his immortal destiny — subjects far beyond the teach- 
ings of physical or brute nature. The one is but the 
complement of the other ; the two harmonious in their 
truths as in their exalted nature. (Dana, Proceedings 
of the American Association for the Advancement of 
Science, 1855, vol. IX, p. 1.) 



REVELATION. 191 

or ignored or whether human conduct was 
or was not influenced or shaped by them. 
This is precisely the frame of mind into 
which many amongst us have actually 
brought themselves, in this connection. 
Thinkers of this sort acknowledge, in a 
theoretical way, the existence of Glod and 
even His Creatorship, perhaps, but they 
deny that His work in the universe has 
gone beyond the creation of a primordial 
nebula. They insist that the present con- 
dition of nature, and all her operations 
from that first period, are due to the work- 
ings of physical forces, inherent in matter, 
without the active presence or intervention 
of any power, outside of them. 

280. Such a position might be safe, 
practically at least, if we could only assure 
ourselves that the factor of individual 
responsibility is entirely out of the problem ; 
that every human being with the use of 
reason does not stand face to face with the 
absolute necessity of determining, at his 
personal risk, all of these grave questions. 
If we be favored creatures of a Divine 
Master, and if it be the will of that Divine 
Master that we "know Him, love Him and 



192 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

serve Him in this world," how shall we 
escape a penalty of some sort for deliber- 
ately refusing to yield obedience to Him? 
If, further, in order to facilitate the dis- 
charge of the great duty we owe Him, God 
has granted us a Divine and express revela- 
tion ; if He has spoken directly to us, and 
given competent proofs of the genuineness 
of His communications, how shall we ex- 
cuse ourselves for refusing deliberately and 
persistently to give it any consideration? 

281. If then we are to be held respon- 
sible for the rejection of such a divine com- 
munication, it is evident^ necessary that its 
Almighty Author should, in the first place, 
make such provision as would enable the 
right-minded among us to place our respon- 
sibility under cover, and in the second 
place to render manifest the deliberateness 
and wrongfulness of rebellion against His 
supreme authority, by distinctly and author- 
itatively defining His rights and by plainly 
promulgating the laws by which He wills 
mankind to be governed. 

282. The bare possibility of there being 
an express divine revelation, is of itself 
sufficient to impose upon every reasonable 



REVELATION. 193 

human being, having any intimation of it, 
the duty of seeking to know whether such 
revelation exists or not, and the further 
duty of searching for the true revelation, if, 
after honest investigation, he sees reason to 
think that there is or ought to be one. And 
this search should be conducted in humility 
of spirit ; not with the arrogant assumption 
of him who summons the Creator before 
the tribunal of his own weak and fallible 
judgment, much as some small court might 
call into its presence a petty culprit, or a 
suspect, to justify himself. 

283. There are many vital truths, apper- 
taining to the religious beliefs of the major- 
ity of civilized humanity, which are dis- 
closed not by nature but by divine revela- 
tion, and which men are called upon to 
accept or reject. The endlessly varied phe- 
nomena of earth and sea and sky teach us 
many a sublime lesson concerning the 
nature and attributes of Grod, His action in 
the universe, the relations between Him 
and His creatures, as declared with fervid 
eloquence by the Eoyal Prophet: "The 
heavens show forth the glory of Grod, and 
the firmament declareth the work of His 
13 



194 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

hands. Day unto day uttereth speech, and 
night unto night showeth knowledge. " 
Ps. 18. 1. 2. But material creation is silent 
as to the great dogma of the Trinity; it 
gives no intimation as to the wonderful 
mysteries of the Incarnation, the Atone- 
ment, etc. Still less does it throw any 
light on Scriptural inspiration, the necessity 
of baptism for salvation, etc. 

284. As for the natural moral law, it is 
not written on the face of the material 
universe, but in the hearts of men. It 
could not be otherwise, for man was made 
a social being, and no enduring society is 
possible, except it be based upon the prin- 
ciples of right and justice. Each individual 
man, by virtue of his creation, is placed 
under obligations, not only towards his 
Divine Creator and Master, but also towards 
his fellow men. Man was, therefore, orig- 
inally constituted with some sense of his 
duties in these regards and with some 
appreciation of the course of conduct which 
these duties exacted of him to pursue. But 
this natural law is necessarily to a great ex- 
tent uncertain, and its unsupported voice is 
easily silenced by the promptings of self- 



REVELATION. 195 

interest, the motions of passion, etc. Upon 
it alone, no true and effective religion could 
be founded. It is neither sufficiently plain 
nor sufficiently authoritative and potent to 
accomplish of itself the best results, in the 
way of promoting higher morality among 
men. 

285. A primitive oral revelation was un- 
doubtedly granted to the first Parents of 
the human race, and this was renewed and 
repeated, under the old dispensation, to the 
Patriarchs, particularly to Abraham, Jacob 
and Isaac; and to the Prophets, notably to 
Moses. As the centuries passed, this prim- 
itive revelation was added to, or perhaps 
we should say, developed only and made 
more clear. Its first appearance in written 
form is to be found in the opening books 
of the Old Testament. But these books do 
not by any means set forth, or it might be 
more accurate to state, do not present with 
positive clearness, all that was divinely 
revealed to the earlier generations. What 
was lacking, under the old law, either in 
actual expression or in clearness, was sup- 
plemented and made complete by Jesus 
Christ, under the New Dispensation. The 



196 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

revelation, therefore, which Christianity, 
resting upon both the new and the old dis- 
pensations, presents for the word's accept- 
ance is the aggregation, the completion, of 
all that has been, in any way and at any 
time, made known by Q-od to man. 

286. But a question now suggests itself: 
conceding that the existence of a divine 
revelation is the just conclusion to be 
drawn from what precedes; what is there 
to convince an honest enquirer that Chris- 
tianity holds any position, in this regard, 
superior to that which is occupied by, say 
Buddhism, or Brahmanism, or Mahomed- 
anism? This may be answered, favorably 
to Christianity, in more ways than one. 

287. In the first place, creeds may be 
judged by the fruits they bear. True, the 
world knows many forms of religious belief, 
but which is the prevailing one among the 
civilized and progressive nations of the 
earth? Christianity, in fair competition 
with all the ancient creeds, conquered the 
Roman Empire, and Rome, in these olden 
days when she was mistress of the world, 
was the representative of the enlightenment 
and progressiveness of the time. This 



REVELATION. 197 

great victory, the Christian Church accom- 
plished without the shedding of blood, ex- 
cept that of her own unnumbered and 
devoted martyrs. With no armed forces at 
her command, and needing none, she ap- 
pealed successfully to the reason and the 
conscience of the Roman world. And 
when, later, her citizens witnessed with dis- 
may the crumbling away of a power, which 
for a thousand years had been proudly 
looked upon as eternal, Roma Eterna; 
when they beheld the imperial purple hum- 
bled into the dust and province after pro- 
vince snatched from her grasp by hordes 
of uncouth barbarians, the Church presented 
a firm front to these wild conquerors; and, 
seizing upon this new material, she built up 
with it the nations which now constitute 
the civilized and Christian world. 

288. Buddhism, on the other hand, has 
shown its inability to conquer physical 
force by moral force alone, and to overcome 
persecution. Christianity has, in different 
ages and in various quarters of the earth, 
withstood the fury of the persecutor, and 
has proved in many fields that the blood of 
the martyrs is the seed of the true Church. 



198 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

Buddhism has been extirpated by force in 
India, the very land of its birth. 

289. Introduced into China and other 
Asiatic countries, either by governmental 
action, or with the countenance and favor 
of potentates, it has left all the populations, 
to whom it has been brought, in their orig- 
inal semi-barbarism; and this despite the 
fact that those same populations are by 
nature well gifted. Japan, alone, of all the 
Buddhist nations has made a serious 
attempt at escaping from that stagnation 
of centuries, which has been, heretofore, 
the common state of all the Buddhist world. 
Moreover this radical change in the Jap- 
anese policies and methods of the past is 
the result solely of secular action; and it 
consists in appropriating some out of the 
many systems and institutions, which the 
Christian nations have built up by their 
own patient and long continued exertions. 
This movement on the part of Japan, 
hitherto so unprecedented among Buddhist 
nations, is still new; and whether it shall 
be a permanent success, or a passing ex- 
periment only, is a matter for time to 
determine. 



REVELATION. 199 

290. Brahnianisin has given no better 
results. The masses who profess it are 
hopelessly set apart and divided among 
themselves by caste; they are all the un- 
resisting slaves of Grreat Britain; all, with 
few exceptions, still barbarous, or at best 
semi-civilized, in this the twentieth century 
of the Christian era. 

291. Both of these false Asiatic creeds 
seek to raise a cruel pessimism to the dignity 
of a religion. Life, they each proclaim, is 
essentially evil, and the greatest of all evils, 
since it is itself the container, as it were, of 
all that is evil. The woes of this existence 
are to be renewed again and again, and 
not infrequently intensified, during a long 
series of existences, through which the trans- 
migrating soul shall pass from state to 
state, until at last actual or practical extinc- 
tion shall close the hideous chapter of pro- 
longed misery. 1 

1 The absurdity and utter dreariness of this vag- 
ary of the transmigration of souls, is well illustrated 
by the alleged experiences in this line, even of the 
great Guatama. "At my request, " says R. Spence 
Hard}', in his Manual on Buddhism, p. 102, "my 
native pundit made an analysis of the number of times 
in which Gotama Bodhisat appeared in particular 



200 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

292. Mahometanism was born in blood 
and rapine, and it made headway only 
through wholesale slaughter, and through 
the terror, inspired by the sanguinary ex- 
cesses of its followers. The moment the 
sword was stricken from its grasp, Maho- 
metanism ceased to spread; and even to 
this day, it remains the creed of fierce and 
fanatical races, whose fury is restrained 
only by the strong hand of the civilized 
Christian world. l 

states of existence, as recorded in the Jatakas, and 
the following is the result. An ascetic, 83 times ; a 
monarch, 58; the dewa of a tree, 43; a religious 
teacher, 26; a courtier, 24; a prohita brahman, 24; 
a prince, 24; a nobleman, 23; a learned man, 22; the 
dewa Sekra, 20; an ape, 18; a merchant, 13; a man 
of wealth, 12 ; a deer, 10; a lion, 10 ; the bird hansa, 8; 
a snipe, 5 ; an elephant, 6 ; a fowl, 5 ; a slave, 4 ; a 
golden eagle, 5 \ a horse, 4 ; a bull, 4 ; the brahma 
Maha Brahma, 4 ; a peacock, 4 ; a serpent, 4 ; a pot- 
ter, 3 , an outcast, 3 ; a guana, 3 ; twice each, a fish, 
an elephant driver, a rat, a jakal, a crow, a wood- 
pecker, a thief, and a pig; and once each, a dog, a 
curer of snake bites, a gambler, a mason, a smith, a 
devil dancer, a scholar, a silversmith, a carpenter, a 
water fowl, a frog, a hare, a cock, a kite, a jungle 
fowl, and a kindura." 

1 That the religion of Mohammed is losing none 
of its hatefulness is shown by the official prayer of 
Islam, which is used throughout Turkey and daily 



REVELATION. 201 

293. We are in possession of the Holy 
Scriptures preserved for us, supernaturally 
as we claim, but suffering doubtless to some 
extent, not in the matter of doctrine but of 
particular expressions, from the inadver- 
tence, etc. of copyist and translator. In 
what parts and to what extent there may 
be verbal differences between certain texts, 
as they have come down to us and the same 
texts as originally delivered, it were profit- 
less to consider here. The space necessary 
for an intelligent criticism of the various 
books of Sacred Scripture, or for a proper 
study of the many controverted passages, 
is not at our disposal. We can only deal 
just now with the Sacred Volume as a 

repeated in the Cairo 'Azhar* university by 10,000 
Mohammedan students from all lands : 

"I seek refuge with Allah from Satan, the accursed. 
In the name of Allah the compassionate, the merciful ! 
O Lord of all creatures ! O Allah ! Destroy the infidels 
and polytheists, thine enemies, the enemies of the reli- 
gion ! O Allah ! Make their children orphans, and 
defile their abodes, and cause their feet to slip, and 
give them, and their families, and their households, 
and their women, and their children, and their relat- 
ives by marriage, and their brothers, and their friends, 
and their possessions and their race, and their wealth, 
and their lands, as booty to the Moslems, O Lord of all 
Creatures." (See Literary Digest, February 2, 1895.) 



202 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

whole, and refer to our Christian revelation, 
as it is to be gathered from the entire con- 
text. 

294. Nor can we enter into a defence of 
particular tenets among the number of 
those which Christians generally accept. 
Considered in the aggregate, they are reason- 
able, presenting a full cosmogony and fur- 
nishing fair explanations for all the pheno- 
mena of nature both physical and psychical. 

295. That they are logically defensible 
is apparant from the fact that they have 
been sincerely and thoughtfully accepted 
by so great a number of men, possessed of 
powerful intellects and high attainments. 
What men, such as Copernicus, Galileo, 
Newton, Quatrefages, Farraday, D'Homa- 
lius D'Halloy, Secchi and Pasteur, with 
numberless others of similar merit, have 
believed, cannot be classed among things 
not reasonably credible, unless by persons 
of shallow acquirements, or of uncom- 
promising anti-Christian bigotry. 

296. A second fact, entitled to much 
consideration, on this branch of our study, 
is the elevated nature of the religious con- 
ceptions, which grow out of our Christian 



REVELATION. 203 

revelation, and their fitness to uplift hum- 
anity and purify human living. This re- 
velation proposes to our belief, as briefly 
summarized in the Apostle's Creed, a triune 
God, Creator and Lord of All; man, His 
favored creature on earth, made to the 
divine image and likeness, called to a life 
of purity and general virtue, entirely free 
as to the direction of his will, yet aided by 
Grod's grace, to be at life's end, each and 
every individual, surely and impartially 
judged, and by that judgment to be ac- 
corded, if good, a supernatural and unend- 
ing reward, and, if vicious and to the very 
last impenitent, an eternal condemna- 
tion; human nature infinitely dignified 
and elevated, by its intimate union with 
Divinity in the person of Jesus Christ, 
etc. 

297. True, particular individuals may 
honestly doubt or question particular doc- 
trines which the Christian world accepts 
generally, but such partial doubts are mat- 
ters for a special discussion and study ; and 
their existence does not logically affect the 
argument here presented. For present pur- 
poses, our subject must be dealt with com- 



204 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

prehensively, our common Christianity be- 
ing viewed so far as possible as a whole. 
Architects may differ in their opinions as to 
the beauty or excellence of certain details 
in the shape or construction of St. Peter's 
Cathedral at Rome, but this does not pre- 
vent its being recognized by all as one of 
the most splendid constructions of modern 
times. 

298. Another helpful consideration , in 
this connection, lies in the comprehensive- 
ness of sacred revelation. Within the com- 
paratively small compass of one single 
volume, it sets forth the story of all ex- 
istences ; the origin and progress of things ; 
the relations established between the Al- 
mighty Creator and His creatures, reason- 
ing and unreasoning. It details the religi- 
ous and moral history of mankind, while it 
has contributed no little to our knowledge 
of secular history. It is a book not only of 
the past, but of the future. We find in it 
wonderful prophecies, some of which have 
already been fully verified, while others are 
having their continuous and manifest ful- 
filment even in our own time. 

299. So comprehensive is Christian re- 



KEVELATION. 205 

velation that it furnishes a just solution for 
every problem that can be suggested by ex- 
istences and conditions ; and for many of 
these problems there is no other solution. 

300. The Revealed Word shows Glod as 
the Origin of the universe ; the Source of all 
order and law. Here we discover a why 
and a wherefore sufficient for all we see; 
for the existence and states of worlds, of 
all objects, animate and inanimate. It dis- 
closes a final purpose or reason for the con- 
struction of the celestial spheres, for the 
peopling of earth with myriad forms of life, 
in a long series, rising one above the other 
in perfection, with man for its culmination. 
If all of this be not for the manifestation of 
Grod's Omnipotence and Glory, and for the 
purpose of peopling heaven with happy 
souls, then why should the universe have 
been called into existence at all, and why 
should it be preserved? Reject Christian 
teaching, and then account, if you can, for 
the physical and mental pains which are 
the lot of man; for the mixture of good 
and evil which is in this world ; for the in- 
terior promptings, or temptations, inclining 
us so strongly at times to the commission 



206 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

of wrong ; for the free will exercised, when 
either we yield to or resist these vicious en- 
ticements. 

301. The force of this argument lies not 
alone in the fact that Christian Revelation 
practically furnishes an answer to every 
problem of being and of conditions, but in 
the further fact that these solutions are all 
so fair and reasonable as to have convinced 
a multitude of the highest human intellects, 
and to satisfy and console countless num- 
bers of ardent and upright souls, in every 
age and in every clime. 

302. Thousands of years ago, as we 
have already stated, Moses, under divine 
inspiration, gave to the world in his book 
of the Genesis, the history of the first 
origin of things and of their earlier develop- 
ment. Later, by the same great Prophet and 
Lawgiver, and by others as the centuries 
went by, additional writings were produced 
under the same inspiration, until at last the 
authors of the New Testament completed 
the sacred deposit of the written revelation 
of Q-od. 

303. These hallowed volumes, in the 
most concise form, cover a range of thought, 



BEVELATION. 207 

far wider and more comprehensive than 
any other body of literature known to the 
world. To be convinced of this, we have 
only to consider the scope of the Holy Writ 
and briefly review its contents. These 
sacred writings both disclose the existence 
and the nature of God, and recount the 
origin of all created things. They define 
man's relationship towards his Creator 
and towards his fellow men. They pro- 
claim the purpose of his Creation, as well 
as his temporal and his eternal destiny. 
They are a narration of great historical 
events, relating principally to religion or 
bearing upon it. They record a number of 
wonderful prophecies, all of which have 
either been already fulfilled, or are in the 
course of manifest fulfilment. 1 Above all, 
they present to us the record of the Divine 

1 One of the strong points in favor of Christianity 
is the multiplicity of the trains of reasoning or lines of 
proof, which are at its command. The prophecies are 
those of the Old law, pointing to Christ, and those of 
the New, pointing to the mission of the Redeemer and 
the mission and the history of the Church which the 
Redeemer established. If these prophecies be verified, 
as we Christians consider conclusively shown, the 
Divinity and Messiahship of Jesus is established beyond 
question, as, also, the verity in general of our faith. 



208 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

Incarnation and Atonement, of the birth, 
life and crucifixion of the Son of God, 
made Man. 

304. Extending as Holy Scripture does 
over so long a line, covering more or less 
completely and plainly almost every subject 
which challenges the deeper thoughts of 
men, besides inculcating obligations against 
which man's lower nature rebels, it would 
be strange, indeed, if it failed to encounter 
determined and persistent antagonism from 
those who refuse to acknowledge any spir- 
itual authority, and particularly from such 
as have, upon the questions involved, the- 
ories of their own to uphold, and their own 
mental attitudes to justify. Upon the same 
principle, we find the anarchist persuading 
himself that the destruction of existing 
social conditions is a necessary preliminary 
to the inauguration of his own experi- 
ments. 

305. These ceaseless attacks, though 
resulting as we know too well in the aban- 
donment by some of their ancestral Chris- 
tian faith, serve, nevertheless, a useful pur- 
pose. They are like the tests for gold, 
which prove the purity of the metal, and 



KEVELATION. 209 

the close scrutiny of the diamond, which 
confirms the genuineness and the value of 
the stone. They are the storms which pre- 
vent stagnation and consequent corruption 
in the world of religious science. Not in 
vain has the world, in the words of Holy 
Writ, been given over to the disputes of the 
learned. 

306. In connection with the Sacred 
Books, there is a remarkable fact, inex- 
plicable from the standpoint of negation. 
Though written thousands of years ago, 
and consequently long before the invention 
of the telescope, the microscope and the 
spectroscope, and long, we may say, before 
the dawn of a reliable physical science; 
though covering a field of thought almost 
unlimited, and dealing with the prof oundest 
questions, they have nevertheless unfail- 
ingly withstood the keen scrutiny of the 
modern scientific mind, and have been 
found capable of being harmonized with 
every one of the successive and truly start- 
ling discoveries, which have rewarded mod- 
ern physical research. 

307. True, there have been very many 
alleged conflicts on various points between 

14 



210 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

religion and science. But these have all, 
with fuller knowledge, resolved themselves 
either into cases of mistaken interpretations 
of particular biblical texts, or cases where 
mere theories have been boldly advanced 
in the name of science, unsupported by 
adequate proofs, and many of them sub- 
sequently absolutely refuted and disavowed. 

308. Very many, for instance, at one 
time believed that spontaneous generation 
was fully established by observation and ex- 
periment, and that Grod was manifestly dis- 
pensed with as the Author of all life. But 
Pasteur and others have so completely dis- 
proved all such theories and assumptions, 
that very few if any now remain to credit 
them. 

309. At the beginning of the great 
struggle between the theories of transfor- 
mation or evolution, and special creation, 
publicly inaugurated we may say between 
Cuvier and Etienne Greoffroy St. Hilaire, 
before the French Academy, in 1830, it was 
supposed by many that there was an irre- 
concilable conflict between transformism 
and the scriptural cosmogony. Darwin, 
himself, entertained this opinion, as ap- 



BEVELATION. 211 

pears from his letter to a student of Jena, 
dated Down, December 5th, 1879, and 
published in the Pall Mall Gazette. 

310. But though evolution has failed 
thus far to carry the day or even to place 
itself above the level of a mere hypo- 
thesis, it has been found that, even had the 
reverse been the case, and had transf ormism 
come to be universally accepted, so long at 
least as the latter remains within the bounds 
of moderation, there is nothing in Chris- 
tian revelation which it could destroy. * 

1 Romanes, prior to his return to faith, was an ad- 
vanced Agnostic. Nevertheless, he recognized the 
fidelity of the Mosaic account of creation, in the fol- 
lowing words : "The order in which the flora and fauna 
are said by the Mosaic account to have appeared upon 
earth, corresponds with that which the theory of Evo- 
lution requires and the evidence of geology proves." 
Even the implacable Haekel is compelled to pay a 
similar tribute. "Two great fundamental ideas,' ' he 
says, in his "History of Creation' ' vol. I, p. 38, "com- 
mon also to the non-miraculous, meet us in the Mosaic 
hypothesis of creation, with surprising clearness and 
simplicity; the idea of separation and differentiation, 
and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. 
Although Moses looks upon the results of the great 
laws of organic development, which we shall later 
point out as the necessary conclusions of the doctrine 
of descent, as the direct action of a constructing 
Creator, yet in this theory lies hidden the ruling idea 



212 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

311. The less extreme among Agnostics 
do not deny the possibility of the truth of 
the Christian teaching. Huxley justified 
his rejection of Christianity, not on the 
ground of any intrinsic possibility, or even 
of any supposed high improbability of its 
cardinal doctrines, but for lack of what 
seemed to him evidence sufficient to sup- 
port them. Darwin, writing to the Jena 
student already referred to, in answer to 
questions touching upon these grave sub- 
jects, expressed a doubt as to "whether 
they are capable of being answered at all," 
and contented himself merely with the ex- 
pression of his own opinion to the effect 
that there has been no revelation. 

312. Has there ever been any other 
creed, or system of religious belief, in 
whose favor what has just been written 
could possibly be advanced? Our reason 
tells us that real science ought logically to 
accord with true revelation, but what has 

of a progressive development and differentiation of the 
originally simple matter. We can, therefore, bestow 
our just and sincere admiration upon the Jewish Law- 
giver's grand insight into nature, and his simple and 
natural hypothesis of creation.' ' In this "grand in- 
sight" of Moses, we Christians see divine inspiration. 



REVELATION. 213 

science left of all other cosmogonies? Who 
can now believe that Atlas upholds the 
heavens, or that the earth rests at the back 
of a tortoise? What, in the light of modern 
research, has become of the Buddhist 
Mount Sumeru as a "center of the world, " 
and as enclosed by girdles of rocks, within 
six concentric oceans? Where are the 
Brahman "Lakapala," stationed at the 
eight corners of the world ; and where the 
two shells of the giant egg, out of which 
Brahma formed the earth and the sky ; and 
the eight regions and the permanent re- 
ceptacle of the waters? * 

1 Huxley, in a paper entitled "The Origin of 
Species," to be found in his volume "Lay Sermons and 
Addresses," makes this significant admission, p. 277: 
"The Myths of Paganism are as dead as Osiris, or Zeus, 
and the man who would revive them, in opposition to 
the knowledge of our time, would be justly laughed to 
scorn ; but the coeval imaginations current among the 
rude inhabitants of Palestine, recorded by writers, 
whose very name and age are admitted by every scholar 
to be unknown, have unfortunately not yet shared the 
same fate, but, even at this day are regarded by nine 
tenths of the civilized world as the authoritative stan- 
dard of fact and the criterion of the justice of scientific 
conclusions, in all that relates to the origin of things, 
and, among them, of species." 

Any one, with less pride and less arrogance, might 
have entertained at least a faint suspicion, that, after 



214 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

313. As a fitting conclusion to the pres- 
ent discourse, it may serve a useful purpose 
to summarize the cardinal propositions, 
which in this and the preceeding addresses, 
we have sought to establish. They are as 
follows: 

1.- — Grod exists: He is Omnipotent, Eter- 
nal, Sovereignly Wise and Sovereignly 
Grood. 

2. — He has created the universe and His 
Providence cares for all His creatures and 
directs them towards their end. 

3. — Man is a special and highly favored 
creature of Grod, made to His image and 
likeness, gifted with reason and conscience 
and invested with dominion over the earth. 

4. — From the foregoing must be de- 
duced, by way of conclusion, that Grod, as 
man's Creator and Supreme Benefactor, is 
entitled to his recognition, love, adoration 
and obedient service; and that not only 
is it right and fitting that man should 
render such homage to his Creator, but it is 

all, the "nine tenths of the civilized world" might be 
right in their conclusions upon these vital questions, 
and that the one tenth, even though the latter included 
Huxley himself, might be wrong. 



REVELATION. 215 

incumbent upon him as a positive duty so 
to do. 

5. — Grod, having Himself established 
these conditions, and particularly the ex- 
ceptional, exalted and unique relationship 
existing between Himself and mankind, He 
would be nullifying Himself, if He did not 
require man to render Him such homage. 

6. — Man, in virtue of his having been 
made to the image and likeness of Grod, 
which likeness is necessarily in his spiritual 
nature, his spiritual part or soul is endowed 
with free will and understanding; hence 
the homage he renders to Grod must be en- 
lightened and voluntary. 

7. — If voluntary and enlightened love, 
adoration and service are due from man to 
Grod, and are required of him by the divine 
will, it follows that man, in order to be able 
to fulfil that duty, must have a sufficient 
degree of certain and definite knowledge 
concerning the existence and nature of 
God, and of the relationship between Grod 
and himself: and, moreover, he must be 
acquainted with the divine laws and ordin- 
ances which he is to abey. 

8. — Knowledge of the sort here required 



216 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

can come only from Grod, primarily; for 
both the things to be observed and the 
obligation to observe them are from Grod. 
No sufficient or proper knowledge of all this 
can come from any other source, and even 
could it be obtained in any other way, 
knowledge thus derived, not having the 
sanction of divine communication, would 
be without either authority or conclusive- 
ness. 

9. — It follows legitimately, from all of 
the foregoing, that G-od, claiming human 
recognition, love and worship, must have 
made Himself adequately known to man; 
and that, requiring a willing obedience 
from His free and rational creature, He 
must have formulated, in some recognizable 
shape, and established a practicable code of 
law. How, otherwise, could He have placed 
the conscience of man under bond towards 
Himself? 

10. — Disclosures from Grod to man, of 
the character under consideration, con- 
stitute the very revelation which Christian- 
ity offers to mankind as divinely given and 
divinely preserved. 

11. — The existence of a divine revelation 



REVELATION. 217 

being granted, the solemn obligation must 
arise for the individual man, under grave 
penalty of some sort, to accept such revela- 
tion and to observe it faithfully. 

12.— In the discharge of this solemn 
duty, the prudent, thoughtful man, who 
has come to recognize it, is forced to accept 
what Christianity presents to him as con- 
stituting the one true divine revelation. 
And he will ground his reasons for so doing 
on the facts that there is in all the world 
absolutely nothing else which presents the 
slightest claim to the character of a true 
communication from Grod to man, nothing 
which accords so fully and universally with 
our reason, nothing which, though formul- 
ated like it in the early twilight of history, 
is nevertheless found to harmonize in all 
matters with all the latest and most un- 
looked for disclosures of modern science. 



FIFTH LECTURE. 
MAN AND THE APE. 

Are They Cousins? 

314. The forming of an enlightened 
opinion upon the deep and complicated 
question of man's origin is no easy task. 
Men of highest scientific attainments differ 
widely upon this subject. Darwin and 
"Wallace, the dual Fathers of Darwinism, 
who, from different quarters of the earth, 
gave simultaneously this theory to the 
world, parted company at this point. In 
addition to Wallace, a host of other great 
authorities have questioned, in whole, or as 
to the soul at least, the proposition that 
man is closely related to the ape. Among 
the number may be mentioned, without at 
all exhausting the list, Agassiz, Virchow, 

(218) 



MAN AND THE APE. 219 

Pasteur, Wigand, Pfaff, Koelliker, Grries- 
baek, Ehrenberg, Burrueister, VanBeneden, 
Mivart, Beal, Wainwright, Davidson, Daw- 
son, Dana, Milne Edwards, Baer, Stokes, 
Zahni, CaiTiitkers, Houghton, Baron Cau- 
cky, Dumas, Barrande, Berguerel Pere, 
Grande Eury, Fluorens, Faivre, Fredault, 
De Saporta, Chevreul, Trousseau, Thomas 
H. Martin, C. L'Eveque, Gluiol, de Blain- 
ville, Quatrefages, de Nadaillac, Figuier, 
Robin, Blanchard, Baurugartner, Durck- 
heim, Seccki, Branconi, Piancani, Todaro, 
Chiringhello. 

315. Whosoever is satisfied to take his 
opinions in this connection at second hand 
may think almost as he pleases, and find 
for the conclusions thus adopted more or 
less support in mere authority. Should he, 
on the other hand, determine to solve the 
problem for himself, he is confronted by 
the necessity of ranging over the entire 
field of science, physical and metaphysical. 

316. After all, this discussion is a mere 
surface agitation. The vast majority among 
civilized men, of average intelligence and 
even higher, are either too busy, or too 
little interested in the matter, to undertake 



220 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

the proper study of so complicated a ques- 
tion and, therefore, they remain satisfied 
with the beliefs, in this respect, which have 
come to them from their ancestors. This, 
under the circumstances, is a logical course 
to pursue, for a man may well discharge 
the duties of highest citizenship, live cor- 
rectly and die happily, without having ever 
looked into the volumes of Darwin, or of 
Wallace, of Huxley, or of Mivart. 

317. The truly contemptible are those 
who, imagining themselves advanced thin- 
kers, when in fact they are mere ignoram- 
uses, jump at fixed conclusions upon this 
grave question, and on others still more 
difficult and solemn, on the simple reading, 
perhaps, of a magazine article or two, or 
the hearing of a single lecture. 

318. Our subject is too broad to be fully 
covered within the compass of a single 
address, and we must, therefore, confine 
ourselves, now, to its presentation in one, 
only, of its many aspects. In view of the 
great importance accorded by Darwinians 
to the similarities, actual and supposed, be- 
tween man and the ape, it may be well for 
us to devote the time presently at our dis- 



MAN AND THE APE. 221 

posal, to the study of these similarities and, 
also, necessarily, of the dissimilarities, be- 
tween these two forms. 

319. The importance of similarity, as 
establishing kinship, should not be exag- 
gerated. Men's ideas, in this respect, are 
uncertain and influenced largely by precon- 
ceptions. Some find likeness, where others 
are unable, or unwilling to do so. Instances 
are numerous where men of different fam- 
iles, and even of different nationalities, 
have resembled each other closely, * while, 
on the other hand, even twins are often, 
mentally and physically, unlike. Further- 
more, personal appearance, even in the 
same individual, varies much with time and 
circumstances. Often, we can scarcely 
recognize the man grown old, in the pic- 
tures taken of him in his youth, or even in 
his early manhood. Evolutionists them- 
selves dwell much upon the changes through 
which the ape passes, as it advances in age, 
claiming that the young ape resembles man 

1 The student of Ancient Persian History can 
readily recall the case of the murdered Bardius (or 
Smerdis) and the imposter Gomates. See, also, for a 
record of some remarkable historical resemblances, 
' 'Causes Celebres," Vol. I, pages 33, 229. 



222 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

more closely than the older. We would 
never, except as the result of instruction, 
or of personal observation, recognize in the 
tadpole a youthful frog, or in the wiggletail 
a young mosquito, or in a caterpillar the 
coming butterfly. 

320. But there are other and stronger 
reasons why mere resemblance should not 
be held proof positive of common descent. 
The very question at issue is, whether man 
and the ape are of the same parentage, or 
whether they are the results of different 
acts, or different processes of creation. 
Similarities in structure, or in appearance, 
if an argument at all upon such an issue, 
support the second of these theories as 
strongly as they do the first. 

321. There is more or less resemblance 
between all the vertebrates. This should 
occasion no surprise, since they all live 
upon the same earth, breathe the same air, 
eat the same kinds of food, and have to 
meet so many of the same conditions. In 
beings thus linked together in so many 
ways, similarity of structure must certainly 
be expected. 

322. Wherever the same results are to 



MAN AND THE APE. 223 

be accomplished, or the same conditions to 
be met, like appliances are apt to be em- 
ployed. When, therefore, it was time to 
call into existence creatures, not small, or 
soft and flaccid like the earth worm, the 
bony skeleton was a proper device, where- 
with to give to these new forms the firm- 
ness and solidity needed to uphold and pro- 
tect the complicated organs to be brought 
into use, and to serve as levers, which, with 
the muscle attachments, should secure 
great force in a small compass and render 
possible free and easy movement in all 
directions. 

323. Whether the new creatures were to 
be swimmers, crawlers, flyers, climbers or 
walkers, would not the same bony frame, 
with muscle attachments, modified as needed 
to meet particular requirements, be the best 
contrivance with which to accomplish all of 
the various ends in view? 

324. There are in this world a multitude 
of buildings, of every shape and size and 
devoted to a number of uses. Differ as 
these may in particular details, they are all 
constructed upon the same general plan. 
They have foundations, floors, walls, doors, 



224 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

windows, roofs, etc. This identity in gen- 
eral design does not argue any necessary 
connection between the structures them- 
selves. It tells, only, that all of them have 
been reared by man, and upon general 
lines, which his judgment and experience 
have shown to be the most suitable. 

325. If, therefore, God made man by a 
direct act of creation, He might very well, 
in the shaping of man's body, have made 
use of a structural form, already in general 
and satisfactory service for so many of the 
lower orders, changing it only so far as 
deemed necessary. 

326. If, by this reasoning, it be estab- 
lished that mere resemblance furnishes no 
true argument, favoring the doctrine of 
man's derivation from any lower form, as 
against the theory of his special creation, 
we may pass on at once to the considera- 
tion of the dissimilarities between man and 
the ape, in order to ascertain whether they 
serve better as premises, from which to draw 
just conclusions in this discussion. 

327. It may be fairly claimed that, in 
the matter even of first or general appear- 
ance, there is a striking difference between 



MAN AND THE APE. 225 

the human and the simian. Of course, 
there is wide variation, in the matter of 
personal grace and beauty, between the 
numerous races of men, as there is between 
individuals.; but, for the purposes of com- 
parison, it is only fair to contrast the best 
types of the species concerned. This done, 
in our present case, we must be struck with 
the immense advantage which the higher 
being enjoys in this respect. He stands 
erect, the curves of his body are all grace- 
ful, his limbs are clean cut and shapely, his 
head round and well poised, and his coun- 
tenance is not only clothed with physical 
beauty, but illumined, also, with the light 
of a mighty intelligence. 

328. The ape, on the other hand, is 
shaggy and uncouth, stooping in position, 
shambling in gait, long of arm and short of 
leg. He has little, if any, forehead, his face 
protrudes and his expression is one either 
of stupidity or of maliciousness. 

329. Passing from the general to the 
particular, let us consider first the matter 
of posture. Man is the only animal holding 
himself perfectly erect. The normal human 
being stands in such position that a perpen- 

15 



226 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

dicular, could it be dropped from the top of 
his skull, would strike the earth along a 
line, passing under the concaves of his feet. 
The entire human skeleton is structurally 
adapted to the habitual maintainance of 
this upright carriage, and the muscles are 
disposed to the same end. The ape, on the 
other hand, has an oblique articulation of 
the lower members, which does not permit 
of its holding the erect position. 

330. This divergence is not at all unim- 
portant. The characteristic under con- 
sideration is one of a group of man's dis- 
tinguishing marks, all of which disclose 
this impressive peculiarity, that they relate, 
principally, if not exclusively, to our higher 
nature. The upright carriage adds little, 
if anything, to man's efficiency, so far as 
mere animality is concerned, But it does 
contribute largely to that nobility of mien, 
which belongs to him, and which so 
eminently befits the commanding position 
which he holds in nature. It must, also, 
as later we shall show, have favored greatly 
the development of man's intellectual 
powers. 

331. " Another most conspicuous differ- 



MAN AND THE APE. 227 

ence," says Darwin, ("Descent of Man," 
page 56) "between man and the lower 
animals is nakedness of his skin." Mon- 
keys universally are hairy, apes particu- 
larly being covered with heavy natural 
coats. 

332. This is a distinction, inexplicable, 
except it be regarded as a provision, in- 
tended to hasten or facilitate the progress 
of human civilization. Surely, viewed from 
the standpoint of mere animal existence, 
the ape, with its original covering, would 
seem better endowed than man, who is 
born without similar protection from heat 
and cold and from storms. 

333. But, we can understand the wis- 
dom of this seeming deprivation, when we 
consider that the natural exposure of his 
body has driven man to the erection and 
improvement of shelters, from which the 
passage was easy to the construction of 
vehicles and boats, laying in this way the 
foundations of architecture and making a 
beginning of transportation by land and 
water. We are helped further to the same 
understanding, by the reflection that his 
native nudeness has forced upon man the 



228 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

necessity of providing covering for his 
body; first, possibly, leaves or pelts, then 
skins, inaugurating in this way the manu- 
facture of textiles. 

334. Furthermore, a creature, hairy as the 
ape, could not perform comfortably or well 
many of the labors, upon the execution of 
which our ever-improving civilization so 
largely depends. The shaggy ourang would 
be of little service in the engine room of a 
modern steamship, or, for that matter, in 
the boiler room of any of our larger manu- 
facturing establishments, especially during 
the midsummer. He could not toil in the 
deeper mines, or follow the plow under the 
hot sun, the whole day long. 

335. Man alone of all animals is spread 
over practically the whole earth. He has a 
home in every clime, and adapts himself to 
all conditions. He alone passes freely, and 
often, from zone to zone. Clearly the 
natural nakedness of his body contributes 
much to his emancipation, enabling him to 
accommodate himself by appropriate cloth- 
ing to all variations of temperature, and to 
all changes of weather. 

336. Man is terrestrial, the ape arboreal. 



MAN AND THE APE. 229 

One is a walker, the other a climber. This 
is not a matter of habit, merely. Almost 
the entire structures of the two forms, 
though cast upon lines of general similar- 
ity, as already explained, are varied, as to 
bone, muscle, and articulation, so as to ac- 
cord with this very important difference. 

337. The ape has a short leg and long 
arm; man a short arm and long leg. The 
ape lives upon fruits, and his long arm en- 
ables him, from a secure position, to reach 
his food. Moreover, his fore limbs, as well 
as his hind ones, are instruments of loco- 
motion, and their great stretch facilitates 
safe and rapid climbing. 

338. The American Encyclopaedia, verbo 
ape, thus succinctly describes the differ- 
ences of structure with which we are at this 
moment dealing: "Their arms (the apes') 
almost touch the ground when they stand 
erect on their hind legs; but the legs are 
scarcely a third part of the entire height. 
Their legs are not on the same line with the 
thighs; the knees are turned outward, and 
the soles of the feet turn inward, so as to 
be opposed to one another. The apes are 
thus enabled to grasp the trunks of trees 



230 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

with much greater force than if their mem- 
bers were constructed like man's. The fin- 
gers and toes are long and deeply separated 
from one another; and the thumb, or an- 
terior finger, is completely opposite the 
other four, as well on the hind as on the 
fore limb. Thus their hands and feet are 
equally well formed for grasping and can 
be used indiscriminately." 

339. This difference of habit and struc- 
ture between man and the ape is of greatest 
consequence. Arboreal creatures are pris- 
oners, as it were; for, in forests alone they 
are capable of moving about freely, and 
there alone they find shelter and food. 

340. Had men been climbers, and not 
walkers, they would never have overrun 
the earth and established a mastery over it. 
America would still have been undiscovered, 
had Columbus and his companions been of 
arboreal habits. 

341. Although there is some resemblance 
between the hand of man and that of the 
ape, in the physical mechanisms put into 
service for the performance of manual acts 
by each, still there are between these two 
hands marked differences in structure, and 



MAN AND THE APE. 231 

above all in their respective capabilities. 
The simian hand is uncouth, rough, clumsy 
and callous, designed largely, and so used, 
for purposes of locomotion; whereas the 
human hand is more flexible, is delicate, 
graceful and extremely sensitive. The latter 
is fitted by nature to be what it is, the first 
assistant of the human brain. It is the in- 
strument, by excellence, of all the arts; 
painting, sculpture, music, architecture, 
etc. It is, likewise, a great promotor of 
science, perfecting the inventions of the 
brain and shaping the various implements, 
without which but little scientific progress 
could be made. It has constructed, directly, 
the first models of all appliances, engines, 
machinery, etc., employed in agriculture, 
navigation and commerce. In addition to 
this the human hand is the instrument 
wherewith, either in carving or writing, the 
actions of men are recorded and their 
thoughts preserved so that the knowledge, 
toilsomely acquired by one generation, 
might surely be handed down to those 
which were to follow. 

342. "The hand of man/' says Alfred B. 
Wallace ("Lessons from Nature, " page 



232 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

186) "contains latent capacities and powers 
which are unused by savages, and must 
have been even less used by paleolithic man 
and his still ruder predecessors. It has all 
the appearance of an organ prepared for the 
use of civilized man, and which was re- 
quired to render civilization possible/' 

343. Having in mind the necessity to 
man, as a civilized being, of a hand, such 
as he alone possesses, we can better ap- 
preciate how necessary it is that its char- 
acteristics be preserved, and why to that 
end man should hold himself erect, and use 
his feet only for the purpose of locomotion. 
Were he, in walking or running, to apply 
all four of his extremities to the earth, as 
do the quadrupeds, or use them, as does the 
ape, in the act of climbing, they would 
soon become all equally rude and callous, 
and his hands would consequently be en- 
tirely unfitted for the many elevated ser- 
vices for which they seem to have been 
specially designed. 1 

1 "It is plain that man's hand, enabling him to 
shape and wield weapons and tools to subdue nature to 
his own ends, is one cause of his standing first among 
animals. It is not so obvious, but it is true that his in- 
tellectual development must have been in no small 



MAN AND THE APE. 233 

344. Another gift enjoyed by man alone 
among visible creatures is the faculty of 
speech or language. Whether the first 
human beings, at the moment of their cre- 
ation, were endowed with a language, more 
or less perfect, or whether they were fav- 
ored only with a faculty, to be developed 
by thought and practice, we need not here 
determine. The gift, in whatever shape it 
originally came, is one which the lower an- 
imals do not possess. 

345. The mere expression on the part of 
the lower animals, by sound or gesture, of 

degree gained by the use of his hands. " Tylor, An- 
thropology, ch. 2, p. 43. If by "intellectual develop- 
ment' J we are here to understand the gradual upbuild- 
ing of secular science and of civilization, as we now 
have both of these, no one can object to any portion of 
this author's statement. But if, by the last sentence 
quoted, it is asserted that man's intellectual faculties 
have, by the aid of the human hand, developed from 
the instinct, or whatever else it be that brutes possess 
in the nature of mind, a contradiction or confusion is 
introduced at once for evolutionists. If the hand has 
been causal in its relationship towards human in- 
telligence, as it exists, what becomes of the theory that 
it has been the changes in habit and use that experi- 
ence and thought have inaugurated and gradually 
established which have by degrees straightened up the 
monkey and made in the course of time a human hand 
out of the simian paw ? 



234 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

some emotions, with, perhaps a few of the 
simplest thoughts , cannot fairly be con- 
sidered as a use of language , unless it be 
fair, also, to regard a gill of water as an 
ocean, or an ant-hill as a mountain. 

346. As man is constituted, there could 
be, without speech, no civilization, no 
morals, no science. No race or kind of 
animate beings, other than the human, is 
held together in one close and universal 
bond. Creatures, lower in the scale of life, 
are, even under the most favorable circum- 
stances, only to a limited extent gregarious. 
But, among man, the children of one con- 
tinent secure often their life companions 
within the boundaries of another. He who 
was born under the light of the Aurora 
Borealis, may be buried, perhaps, in the 
shade of the tropical palms. 

347. Universal unity prevails thus 
among men because they have, in speech, 
a means of free and full communication 
among themselves. By its instrumentality 
distance is, as it were, annihilated, and 
dividing barriers are broken down. 

348. There could be no society without 
laws, no morals without some code of right, 



MAN AND THE APE. 235 

no science without rules and methods. To 
say nothing at this moment concerning 
their formulation ; how, without language, 
shall enactments of any character be pro- 
mulgated, preserved or enforced? 

349. Trade and commerce are fruits of 
social intercourse, and, leading to a con- 
stant interchange of ideas, they have con- 
tributed largely to the spread of education, 
and general culture. Trade and commerce, 
moreover, have built our railroads, set up 
our telegraphs and telephones, launched 
our ships upon every ocean and constructed 
our countless factories. 

350. Finally, language, in a sense, is 
the very mother of science. Without dis- 
cussing here whether or not it was a direct 
and immediate gift to man, or whether 
there could be any commencement even of 
thought, without the aid of words or signs, 
it is beyond dispute, that language has con- 
tributed enormously to the increase of 
knowledge. We give names to all external 
objects; and to many conceptions, also, not 
arising, directly at least, from sense im- 
pressions. Memory and imagination may 
recall, by actual mental pictures, objects of 



236 THF LIGHT OF EAITH. 

which we have had cognizance through 
the senses; but, in reasoning, we deal with 
things by the names we have given to 
them. 

351. There is not one of the sciences 
which is of mushroom growth. Each and 
every one of them is the outcome of the 
labors of very many students, in times 
present and times past. Through the in- 
strumentality of language, every individual 
worker in the cause of science profits by 
what others have done and are doing, and 
adds simply, in the same way, his con- 
tributions to a general treasury. Each 
generation receives in turn, as a legacy, the 
combined results of the mental toil of all 
who have gone before. The living take the 
place of the dead and propel onward, in 
uninterrupted progress, the car of knowl- 
edge. And all of this has been rendered 
possible only by the power of the pen and 
the printing press to record ideas and to 
disseminate them widely. 

352. The typical skull of man has little 
more resemblance to the skull of any of the 
apes than such as results from the fact that 
both are effective bony cases, serving the 



MAN AND THE APE. 237 

common purpose of enclosing and protect- 
ing brains. A glance at the figures repre- 
senting these several forms of brain cases, 
in the special publications upon this sub- 
ject, should satisfy us as to this fact. 1 And 
the brains which fill these different boxes 
show, likewise, very considerable dissimil- 

1 We cannot here enter into any lengthy study of 
the Neanderthal and other supposed prehistoric skulls 
which some have maintained belonged in the olden 
times to creatures, intermediate between man and the 
ape. The position once taken with regard to these 
skulls has been generally abandoned. "In no sense," 
says Huxley, "can the Neanderthal bones be regarded 
as the remains of a being intermediate between man 
and the ape." Man's Place in Nature, p. 253. The 
few bone fragments that were found by Kugene Dubois 
in Java are now the main reliance of extreme evolu- 
tionists in the line of supplying, in this connection, 
the "missing link." These particular fragments con- 
sist of the roof of a skull, two teeth and a left upper 
thigh bone. They were found somewhat scattered 
about in the bed of an ancient river. There is reason 
for doubting whether all these fragments belonged to 
the same individual ; but even if such a connection be- 
tween them be conceded, the probability remains that, 
in so far as these relics show any departure from a 
normal type, they indicate that the being in whom they 
appeared was a freak, an anomaly ; one of those abnor- 
malities which must have appeared from time to time 
in the prehistoric age, as they do still, not infrequently, 
in our own days. 



238 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

arities. The cranial capacity of the highest 
ape does not exceed thirty-four cubic inches , 
as against sixty-eight in the lowest exist- 
ing man. 

353. The difference in average weight of 
brain between the two is equally striking. 
" While similar as to their general arrange- 
ment/ ? says E. B. Taylor , in the Encyclo- 
paedia Britannica, Vo. Anthropology, "to 
the human brain, those of the higher apes, 
such as the chimpanzee, are much less com- 
plex in their convolutions, as well as much 
less both in size and general weight — the 
weight of the gorilla's brain hardly exceed- 
ing twenty ounces, and man's hardly 
weighing less than thirty-two ounces, though 
the gorilla is considerably the larger animal 
of the two." 

354. The greatest of all differences be- 
tween the human and the simian, and the 
last we shall now consider, lies in the en- 
joyment by the former of what may be 
designated, in a general way, as high men- 
tality. It is in the aspect of a possession of 
humanity, in the aggregate, not in that of 
a gift to individual men, that, for present 
purposes, we must regard this great at- 



MAN AND THE APE. 239 

tribute. There is, among human beings, a 
community of interest, and, in a sense, a 
community also of possessions, by virtue 
of which it comes about that every individ- 
ual profits not only from what he himself 
does, but shares, as well, in the benefits 
resulting from the works accomplished by 
his fellows. 

355. From the standpoint of a special 
creation, there is no necessity for the en- 
dowment of every man with a high intel- 
lectuality. Indeed, the existence of any- 
thing like a general intellectual level among 
men would not accord with the Christian 
conception of a Divine Creator and Su- 
preme Lord, Who, having in view the 
gradual advancement of mankind, in part 
through human co-operation, has brought 
into life, in times present and past, a vast 
multitude of human creatures, assigning to 
each a particular role, generally humble, 
rarely great, to be filled in the grand work 
of human progress, and Who has distrib- 
uted His gifts in accordance with this 
design. 

356. Human society rests upon the 
broad foundation of universal human en- 



240 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

deavor, and it calls for an almost infinite 
variety of services. The poor laborer, be- 
spattered with mud, toiling, spade in hand, 
ten hours out of the twenty-four, in the 
bottom of a ditch; the miner, laboring 
half -naked and blackened with dust, in the 
bowels of the earth, are as necessary, prob- 
ably more so, to the world's progress, as is 
the philosopher, who, pen in hand, broods 
on the mysteries of nature. The philosopher 
is as little fitted to dig the earth, or burrow 
in the mine, as is the laborer to deal with 
the abstruse problems of science ; yet, such 
is the closeness of the bond holding all 
men together, that the progeny of to-day's 
philosopher may be the physical toiler of 
to-morrow, while he who at this moment is 
laboring painfully with his hands, may give 
to the world a son, destined to take the 
highest rank among men of learning. 

357. Therefore, in comparing the in- 
telligence of man with that of any other 
class of beings, we must have in mind this 
community of possessions among men, and 
place all that humanity has accomplished 
in contrast with the practically nothing, 
which all the lower order of animals com- 
bined are doing, and have done. 



MAN AND THE APE. 241 

358. In this view it is simply farcical to 
compare the mass of leaves and twigs, 
which some ape has put together in a tree- 
top, with, say that splendid masterpiece of 
human genius, St. Peter's, in Eome. 
Equally absurd is it to liken the use, by an 
ourang, of a broken bough, to help his 
hobbling along, to the invention of the 
steam engine, or the printing press. 

359. A bee may enter at the window of 
some one of the world's great sugar refin- 
eries, to absorb the sweet particles which 
lie scattered about the floor. But, because 
that bee comes from a hive, large perhaps 
as a water bucket, shall we compare it, for 
intelligence, with the being who has erected 
the magnificent structure into which the in- 
sect has strayed, who has invented all the 
machinery humming within its walls, who 
conducts its complex operations? 

360. It is no less indefensible to main- 
tain that the difference between the human 
and the simian intelligence is one of degree 
only, than it would be to proclaim that 
there is no difference, other than of degree, 
between the lowest unicellular creature and 
the highest mammal, because, forsooth, the 

16 



242 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

cell enters into the construction of both 
forms. 

361. While upon the subject of this, the 
greatest distinction between man and all 
the lower animals, it is proper to emphasize 
the exclusiveness with which man enjoys 
this enormous advantage. There is con- 
troversy as to which among the beasts has 
the most intelligence. Be it the horse, or 
the dog; what has either of these done, 
which is at all comparable to the accom- 
plishments of man? They eat and drink 
and sleep. They know nothing of the 
general past, and give no evidence of hav- 
ing even a vague conception of the future. 
They enjoy the faculties, simply, which are 
necessary for the supplying of their daily 
necessities, with, possibly, some added to 
enable them to serve the purposes of man. 
They have been the associates of man from 
the earliest time, and have had, therefore, 
the advantage of his long continued ex- 
ample and training; yet this has profited 
them nothing, for the horses and dogs of 
antiquity, shown in the earliest known 
delineations, were practically the same as 
are the horses and dogs of our time. 



MAN AND THE APE. 243 

362. Mount Everest has an altitude of 
over 29,000 feet. Accompanied as it is by 
the other giant mountains of the Himalayan 
Range, we are willing to concede that it 
was formed in the same manner and at the 
same time, ages past, as were its com- 
panions. But, if by some chance the peer 
of Everest were found, springing straight 
up, 29,000 feet toward the skies, from the 
surface of a plain, broken otherwise only 
by slightest undulations, would we not con- 
clude that some extraordinary agency had 
thrust it forth from the bosom of the earth, 
in the midst of such surroundings? 

363. These distinctions, which we have 
been considering, are more than mere dif- 
ferences, they are gifts. Nor, properly, are 
they so many separate gifts. There is 
really but one great gift, and viewing skull 
and brain as practically one, five adjuncts, 
or aids. Had man been dull as the brutes, 
he would have been better off hairy, rather 
than naked; better off running swiftly on 
all fours than more slowly on two feet, and 
safer, far, with rough, strong fore feet, 
armed with sharp and heavy claws, than 
with delicate and tender hands, such as he 



244 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

now has. A small skull and brain would, 
in that contingency, have answered all 
requirements, and the possession of lan- 
guage, truly such, would have been an im- 
possibility. 

364. We cannot conceive of the enjoy- 
ment or use of the human intellect, with- 
out the help of these accessories. Man, un- 
able to communicate extensively with his 
fellows, or to record his thoughts and ex- 
periences, tied to tree-tops by arboreal 
habits, unable to traverse the seas, or to 
travel afar over the land, unfitted to brave 
every climatic condition, unable to shape 
or serviceably handle implements and tools 
— man, in such a condition, would never 
have accumulated the vast fund of varied 
knowledge, which is now his treasure, or 
have accomplished the marvelous things 
which are the fruits far more of his mental 
exertion than of his physical toil. 

365. Evolutionists, who maintain that 
human intelligence, which is so broad and 
so deep, and which has achieved so very 
much, is different in degree only, and not 
in nature from the comparatively poor and 
pitiful intelligence of the brute, by this 



MAN AND THE APE. 245 

very contention, claim, also, that the one 
great gift of man, understanding, existed, 
to some extent at least, before its five acces- 
sories, already described. Their proper 
conclusion is that the natural nakedness of 
man, his upright carriage, his larger brain 
and skull, his standing or walking upon 
two feet, instead of running upon all fours, 
or climbing therewith, his exquisitely con- 
structed and omni-useful hand ; that these 
all have been the results of human think- 
ing. The simian forefather of man, taught 
by reason and experience, that it was better 
to stand and walk, changed not only his 
way of carrying himself, but, brought 
about, also, alterations in the length and 
and shape of important bones and muscles, 
and in the disposition of cardinal joints. 
By cogitation, our progenitors constructed 
languages, more or less elaborate. The 
brain, we are told, is practically all there is 
to thought, secreting it, as it were, some- 
thing after the same fashion as the liver 
secretes bile ; yet, by this process of thought 
secretion, man has, by degrees, pushed 
outward the bony bounds of his skull, 
thereby enlarging the brain case, and has, 



246 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

also, filled up the space thus acquired, with 
more brainy substance. 

366. Whether such things be at all pos- 
sible, we shall not here discuss. It may, 
however, be well suggested, that, except for 
those, who, like Haeckel, deny the exist- 
ence of a Creator, the simple and more 
rational proposition seems to be that man, 
so absolutely peculiar, so immeasurably 
lifted up above the entire mass of other 
visible beings ; man, who has so filled the 
earth with the evidences of his transcedent 
superiority, has been created directly, im- 
mediately and from his beginning, with all 
his natural gifts, principal and accessory, 
and in all intrinsic respects, substantially 
as he is. 

367. It is urged that, since it has been 
established that the particular comes always 
from the general, and the complex from 
the simple, to claim for man a special 
creation is attempting to make of him the 
one single exception in all the constructive 
work of nature. 

368. Even were the existence of such a 
law satisfactorily proven, which it is not, it 
does not follow necessarily that, because a 



MAN AND THE APE. 247 

condition is general, it must be universal 
and exclusive. So opposed is the verdict of 
human experience to such a supposed law, 
that the fact of such opposition has become 
crystallized into the popular maxim, "no 
rule without an exception. ?? 

369. Whether or not, in the processes 
of nature, we find laws, in the sense of uni- 
form methods of works, must depend largely 
upon the manner in which we group things. 
Material objects, doubtless, attract each 
other, according to the law of gravitation ; 
but, if, with gravitation, we associate cohe- 
sion, adhesion, chemical affinity and mag- 
netism, we have at the least five different 
regulations of attractive force. If we further 
generalize and class together all the forces 
to which matter is subjected, we take in the 
repellant as well as the attractive, and are 
confronted with actions and results actually 
contrary. 

370. Even within the strictest lines of 
classification, we are constantly in the pres- 
ence of the exceptional. We may cite some 
instances out of many. "A remarkable ex- 
ception, " says the American Cyclopaedia, 
verbo Expansion, u to the general law of the 



248 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

expansion of liquids in proportion as they 
are heated is shown in the ease of pure 
water. When this is cooled from the tem- 
perature of 60 degrees, it continues to con- 
tract , until it reaches 39.2 degrees. From 
this point it expands until it freezes at 
32 degrees, its rate of expansion being 
about the same from 39, whether it is heated 
or cooled, etc." 

371. Again, the attraction of the earth's 
mass should make water run down hill; 
that is, draw as near as possible to the gen- 
eral center. But the earth is orange shaped, 
with a difference between its polar and 
equatorial diameters of say twenty-six 
miles. This forms, of course, a bulge, 
running around the sides of the earth, 
thirteen miles in height at the equator, 
or more than twice as tall as Mount Everest. 
And the great Mississippi River, running 
from north to south, mounts this slope and 
so lifts its waters up, from source to mouth, 
a distance of say four miles. 

372. In chemistry, certain substances, 
as a rule, refuse obstinately to unite, but in 
one particular combination they do so at 
once. Two particular substances will stay 



MAN AND THE APE. 249 

persistently apart, until a third be added, 
all in fixed proportions, whereupon the three 
will immediately go together. 

373. Even within the field of biology, 
observation does not show the prevalence 
of absolute uniformity. We have animals, 
constructed so as to breathe in oxygen and 
breathe out carbonic acid gas ; while plants 
absorb carbonic acid gas and give forth 
oxygen. There are animals in the ocean 
and fishes which travel over the land; 
beasts which fly, and birds which do not 
know what flying is. We find animals 
with scales and fishes without; creatures 
with teeth, others without; some minus 
legs, others with more than a hundred. 
Life inhabits bodies of every conceivable 
shape, long and short, tall and lowly, large 
and small, round as balls, perfectly flat, 
drawn out like wires; star-shaped, rod- 
shaped, and so on indefinitely. 

374. The conditions which surrounded 
one original cell form, and which, if the 
evolutionary theory be correct, worked it 
up into an earth worm, cannot have been 
the same as those which operating upon 
another cell, brought forth, in time, the 



250 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

flea. The whale and the turtle ; the eagle 
and the bat ; the crocodile and the serpent ; 
the toad and the oyster; all of these creat- 
ures, if starting each from an original, uni- 
cellular form, must have traveled towards 
their respective final shapes, along very dis- 
similar routes. 

375. It seems, therefore, clear, that 
diversity is as much a law of nature as uni- 
formity; in other words, that even nature 
herself is not confined absolutely to partic- 
ular ways or processes, for the accomplish- 
ment of her ends. 

376. Unless it be assumed that unbroken 
uniformity must have necessarily prevailed 
throughout the entire work of creation, 
there is, even independent of revelation, 
sufficient warrant for the belief that man 
has been taken out of the operation of the 
rule of evolution, if such rule there be gen- 
erally, and made an exception. He is ex- 
ceptional in so very many other respects, 
that there is no reason why we should balk 
the idea of his being exceptional likewise in 
this. 

377. Man occupies a position absolutely 
unique in nature. However much he may 



MAN AND THE APE. 251 

in parts resemble lower forms, as a whole 
these lower forms resemble man as little as 
the shadow resembles the substance. His 
immeasurable superiority over all other 
visible beings, bespeaks him the favored 
creature of God, and justifies the contention 
that he holds a special relationship to his 
divine Maker, higher, far higher, than the 
one existing between the Supreme Lord and 
that great dumb world, which is under 
man's dominion. 



SIXTH LECTURE. 

THE MIND AND THE BRAIN. 

378. Much is being written and said 
concerning thought's being a mere brain 
secretion , evidencing in no way the exist- 
ence of the human soul. 

379. That there is some close and par- 
ticular connection between mind and the 
brain is beyond dispute. But it does not 
follow from this, as a necessary conclusion, 
that the mind is always and essentially 
dependent upon the brain for its action. 
The elaborate performances through which, 
as the result of education or of habit, some 
men go so often and so well, are scarcely 
done automatically. The skilled musician, 
rendering at sight a long and difficult piece 
of instrumental music, takes cognizance, as 

(252) 



THE MIND AND THE BRAIN. 253 

he hastens on, of the numerous succeeding 
changes in the written score, and responds 
to every mark, indicating variation of note, 
time or expression, by appropriate handling 
and fingering. * 

380. All the successive cognitions in- 
volved in such an operation and their ac- 
companying and responsive directions of 
hands and fingers are had and executed 
with a rapidity which justifies the suspicion 
that brain action is not relied upon in the 
operation. Though the heart beats more 
strongly and rapidly when the body is 
violently exercised, we know of no indica- 
tion of quickened action which the brain 
gives, responsive to the great acceleration 
of mental activity called for in cases such 
as the one under immediate consideration, 

381. The protective measures to which 

1 "But, further, a higher degree of the same 
'training' (acting on an organism specially fitted to 
profit by it) enables an accomplished pianist to play a 
difficult piece at sight; the movement of the hands and 
fingers following so immediately upon the sight of the 
notes that it seems impossible to believe that any but 
the very shortest and most direct tract can be the chan- 
nel of the nervous communication through which they 
are called forth.' ' Carpenter, Mental Physiology 
ch. 5, p. 217. 



254 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

at times the instinct of self-preservation so 
usefully drives the ready, quick-witted 
man, in the face of sudden peril , frequently 
involve several successive mental operations 
— a close, though hasty observation of sur- 
rounding conditions , a weighing of probab- 
ilities in connection with various lines of 
action which may be open, the passing in 
judgment upon the efficacy of the different 
ways, or methods of escape that may sug- 
gest themselves, and the final execution of 
the physical acts which the judgment calls 
for in the emergency. And all of these 
things must be accomplished frequently 
with the speed of a twinkling. It is hard to 
believe that there is within the brain in 
such cases, a corresponding unfelt spasm of 
powerful and accelerated action. 

382. Every man has some experience 
with individual inspiration. He strives 
long and vainly to disentangle some mathe- 
matical or other problem, and when at last 
he may perhaps be ready to abandon the 
effort, the solution comes to him, of itself 
as it were, and with the swiftness of a flash. 
Or it may be that, in despair, he has laid 
the matter aside, when, at some later time, 



THE MIND AND THE BEAIN. 255 

the answer to his prior questions drifts into 
his mind, as a cloud makes its way into the 
visible horizon. Archimedes in his bath, 
mastering thus in an instant a difficulty 
that had long resisted him, rushed forth 
naked into the streets of Syracuse, shout- 
ing as he went, "Eureka! Eureka! " How 
is it that the human mind receives such 
sudden and inexplicable enlightenments? 
Are they to be credited to the brain, after 
that organ has in many cases been so long 
and vainly struggling to attain them, or are 
they not rather the occasional risings of the 
spirit that is within us above the limita- 
tions of the flesh? * 

383. And natural somnambulists; how 
shall we account, on the theory that thought 
is mere brain secretion, for the wonder- 

i "Working backwards from a limited number of 
phenomena, genius by its own expansive force, reaches 
a conception which covers them all. There is no more 
wonderful performance of the intellect than this ; but 
we can render no account of it. Iyike the Scriptural 
gift of the Spirit, no man can tell whence it cometh. 
The passage from fact to principle is sometimes slow, 
sometimes rapid, and at all times a source of intellec- 
tual joy. When rapid, the pleasure is concentrated, 
^ind becomes a kind of extasy, or intoxication. " Tyn- 
dall, ■ lectures on Light," lect. 2, p. 47. 



256 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

ful things which they so often do in 
slumber ; things apparently requiring men- 
tal activity, in some cases of a character or 
degree far higher than is at all possible to 
the sleepers in waking moments? How can 
the brain in such cases be fully operative, 
during a sleep so profound that the subject 
has usually no recollection of his actions, 
performed while in the somnambulistic 
state? The brain, when operating during 
the thinking process, calls for an access of 
blood, while in order that it may sink into 
the condition requisite for sleep, the blood 
must, to a considerable extent, be expelled. 

384. Cases are recorded of cataleptic or 
trance conditions, so closely resembling 
death as to lead the friends of the subject 
to make all preparations for the burial, and 
yet, despite the cessation of pulse and of 
breathing and the fall of bodily temper- 
ature, inner consciousness remained, and 
the mind was busy. The brain in such 
cases can not have been active, while all the 
rest of the body was being held in the pas- 
si veness of a seeming death. 

385. The brain certainly intervenes, or- 
dinarily at least, in the process of thought, 



THE MIND AND THE BRAIN. 257 

but its connection with human thinking is 
by no means so invariable and so exclusive 
as to warrant the assumption that it is 
solely and alone the instrument of mental 
action. Other organs or members of our 
bodies have connection, more or less close, 
with intellectual activity. The afferent 
nerves which receive and convey inward so 
many sensory impressions arouse or stim- 
ulate thought and supply the mind with in- 
dispensable impressions. The efferent ones 
are the instruments of its volition, putting 
into operation the muscles, so as to give ex- 
terior effect to the interior resolves of the 
mind. 

386. The substance composing each of 
these divisons of the nervous system is 
physically excited or disturbed, as is the 
matter of the brain, and wasted in connec- 
tion with, or as a consequence of mental 
action. And, to an extent, it is the same 
with the blood and with the muscular 
system. The tongue moves, the lips play, 
the hands grasp, and so on, and this, as a 
rule, only after the blood has performed its 
part of suffusing the brain. Shall we say 
for these reasons that our entire bodies are 
17 



258 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

engaged in a process of thought secretion? 
Shall we maintain that the blood, nerves 
and muscles are slaves to the brain, rather 
than that brain and nerves, blood and 
muscles, in fact all the parts and portions 
of our physical organism, are ministers to 
and of a something behind, as it were, and 
superior to them all? 

387. These considerations seem to render 
it manifest that brain is not intellect, or in- 
tellect brain. And what designation other 
than spirit or soul can we possibly give to 
that principle within us which, in addition 
to the vital faculties common to vegetable 
and animal life, possesses other and far 
higher powers, which enable it to see and 
appreciate the phenomena of its own con- 
sciousness, as well as the phenomena of the 
outer world; which observes, compares, 
draws inferences, remembers, looks into the 
future as well as into the present and the 
past, and finally, is the true and first mover 
in all our active relations with the outer 
world? 



SEVENTH LECTURE. 

The Argument from Design, 

388. The Christian argument from de- 
sign, in favor of the existence and provid- 
ence of Grod, is contemptuously styled by 
unbelievers as the " Watchmaker's Argu- 
ment. " In attempting to reply to it they 
become, as it were, microscopists, fasten- 
ing upon small details and seeking to take 
attention from creation as a whole and from 
its vaster and more impressive features. 
Let us think of the parasitic flea, which 
needlessly, as they believe, bites and incon- 
veniences some man or dog, or of the 
microbe which may bring disease or deatlr 
to men or animals, * rather than of the 

1 "Often, indeed, we find higher life wantonly 
sacrificed to the lower, as instanced by myriads of 
parasites apparently created for no other purpose than 
to prey upon creatures better than themselves. " John 
Fiske, "The Idea of God, as Affected by Modern Knowl- 
edge," p. 122. 

(259) 



260 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

great Arcturus and his countless comrades 
of the starry hosts, of this entire beautiful 
earth which maintains us, and rather than 
of man himself, with his princely gifts. The 
Christian contention is that every certain 
plan, simple or complex, implies an intel- 
ligent planner ; and that the degree of in- 
telligence exercised must be proportionate 
in every case to the greatness and com- 
plexity of the work. 

389. This particular argument is but 
presenting in one of its phrases the great 
law of causation, which demands an ad- 
equate cause for every effect. It furnishes 
a reason which has satisfied and is still 
satisfying the great majority of thinking 
men. Extreme evolutionists, on the other 
hand, claim that, in some respects at least, 
nature and its workings are imperfect ; that 
the existence on earth of suffering and evil 
are fatal to the conception of an Omni- 
potent, Allwise and infinitely Merciful God. 

390. Even had this objection any in- 
trinsic force, it could not destroy the evid- 
ences of design to be observed in creation, 
for there are designs great and small, per- 
fect and imperfect. Grant the justice of 



THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN. 261 

every criticism, is there not much left in 
all nature, that is too vast and complex 
to have been the result of the undesigned 
workings of force upon senseless matter? 
In other words, do our observation and 
our reason, brought to bear upon the 
visible universe, leave any room whatsoever 
for the supposition that everything which 
we see is due to mere chance? 

391. It could logically avail nothing to 
prove even that the work of the great 
Designer shows imperfections, for the ar- 
gument still leaves him the Creator and 
Master of all that is, such as it is; hence 
our Creator and Q-od. Nor should it im- 
ply finiteness on the part of Grod to suppose 
that, for some reason, scrutable or inscrut- 
able, He has chosen to make a universe 
which does not come up to ideals of ultra- 
evolutionists. We can determine that the 
artisan possessed the intelligence necessary 
for the making of some particular object 
we are examining, but we cannot, in such 
a case and from such information alone, 
presume him incapable of fashioning still 
more useful or beautiful things. 

392. Where deeds or statutes are to be 



262 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

construed, every word is to be given mean- 
ing and effect, if possible ; all the parts are 
to be harmonized and interpreted together, 
what is clear in one serving to remove the 
ambiguities of another. "Magis valeat 
quam per eat," it is better to save than to 
destroy, is the maxim for the whole and for 
every part. The principle is similar where 
human conduct is being judicially investig- 
ated: every group of connected or related 
acts are studied together, with a view to 
discovering, if possible, a motive common 
to them all ; and when several of the group 
show manifestly one and the same motive, 
that particular motive must be assigned to 
all, unless there be in this regard a patent 
incongruity. 

393. These principles of the laws of 
evidence and construction are obligatory 
upon us here, because of the unity and the 
close relationship existing between all 
natural phenomena, however numerous or 
varied they may be. The same natural 
laws are established everywhere, and the 
same forces operate thoughout the uni- 
verse. 

394. If, therefore, it be apparent that a 



THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN. 263 

vast number out of the multitude of pheno- 
mena, submitted to our observation, be- 
speak a great design or plan and a bene- 
ficent purpose, we should be satisfied that 
all are in this regard alike, and that, if 
benign motive be not manifest to some in- 
dividuals, so far as particular phenomena 
are concerned, the difficulty lies in the 
limitation of human understanding, or in 
the determined adverse bias of certain 
minds. This conclusion is strengthened by 
the fact that this inability, actual or alleged, 
to see great and merciful design even in the 
particular phenomena which are in this 
regard brought into question, is confined to 
a limited number only among civilized and 
enlightened humanity. 

395. It is begging the question to declare 
that suffering is in itself an evil. It may be 
a symptom or a result, but it is not of its 
own nature an evil. It is often the honest 
price which is to be paid for an inestimable 
good. The toils and the pains endured by 
the forefathers of this Republic, during the 
Revolutionary War, were results of British 
oppression; but American liberty is to be 



264 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

credited, to a large extent, to the heroism 
and fortitude of the patriots who so in- 
tensely suffered at Valley Forge. 

398. Whether the trials and the pangs 
which each human being endures in this 
world are regrettable or not depends upon 
their outcome. If they may be rendered 
serviceable, as we Christians maintain, to 
secure and merit an eternity of bliss, there 
is to them a noble philosophy. From this 
standpoint every one of them is a felix in- 
juria, a happy injury; and it is only the 
gloomy tenet of absolute human mortality 
which takes all the reason out of them. 

397. Let our friends, before they attempt 
dealing with the mystery of evil, before 
they seek to use it as a weapon of offense 
against Christian revelation, define for us 
the meaning of the term. Is death in itself 
an evil? Surely not, if it opens for the vir- 
tuous the portals of Paradise. Is suffering, 
mental or physical, an evil? Not by any 
means if it be that human pains and trials, 
meritoriously endured, are the rounds to a 
veritable Jacob's ladder, that leads from 
earth to heaven. 

398. Is punishment visited upon obstin- 



THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN. 265 

ate and unrepentent criminals evil? If so, 
the good may as well yield at once unresist- 
ingly to the unrestrained dominion of the 
wicked. If so, our jails and penitentiaries 
should close, and all public executioners be 
put out of commission. If so, every hung 
assassin has been a martyr, and every con- 
vict is a suffering victim. 

399. And, after they have succeeded in 
indicating something in this world, which, 
outside of or beyond human wrongdoing, 
is in itself an evil, how shall materialists 
determine for us what portion of the evil they 
thus discover and define is not chargeable 
properly to mere human agency, instead of 
to the Lord? If it be per se an evil to 
die, by violence or disease, prematurely, 
are not such deaths invariably due to the 
crime or negligence of the sufferers them- 
selves, or of others with whom they may be 
in relation or contact? Were all men ever 
prudent and virtuous, life, with rare excep- 
tions, would go out as the flame expires 
after the oil in the lamp is exhausted ; and 
death would come only in extreme old age, 
and as the close of long lives spent in con- 
tentment and peace. 



266 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

400. When the world was shocked, not 
so very long ago, by the news of the great 
Martinique disaster, a certain number of 
unbelievers profited by the occasion to pro- 
claim afresh that the occurence of such 
catastrophies bore conclusively against the 
idea of a Deity such as Christians have 
faith in ? for a being, they pretended, which 
could impose such a visitation upon men, 
must be in the nature of a demon, rather 
than of a Grod. 

401. Great calamities of this sort cannot 
be fairly judged by men, in this life; this 
because the only true way of judging them 
is from the standpoint of the individual ex- 
perience of the particular victims. Some, 
let us hope all, who are thus overtaken, 
are virtuous, or else contrite, and for such 
their sudden taking away is a mere sum- 
moning to the higher and more blissful life. 
If any there be who are degraded and 
vicious and obstinately impenitent, there is 
no reason to complain that a term has been 
put to their careers of obdurate evil, 
and that they have been visited at last with 
merited punishment. 

402. It must be further considered that 



THE ABGUMENT FBOM DESIGN. 267 

the original colonization of Martinique was 
in no wise caused or suggested by the Lord, 
nor had He induced the inhabitants thereof 
to remain, despite warnings in the past, 
with their homes about the base of a 
treacherous and dangerous volcano. 



EIGHTH LECTURE, 
MAN OR BUTTERFLY? 

403. In the time of Alexander the Great 
there lived in Greece, Pyrrho, of Elis, a 
philosopher, so-called, one of the most an- 
cient among the sceptics, whose names 
have come down to ns as such. Nothing 
written by himself has survived, and the 
world knows now of him only that which 
his pupil, Simon of Phlius, has recorded. 
Here are his teachings, as summarized by 
Zeller, in three propositions: — We know 
nothing about the nature of things ; hence 
the right attitude towards them is to with- 
hold judgment; the necessary result of 
withholding judgment is imperturbability. 

404. A generation or more before 
Pyrrho, Gorgias had maintained in his 
book "Concerning the Non-Existent, or 
Nature, " the three theses: — (1) Nothing 

(268) 



MAN OR BUTTERFLY? 269 

exists; (2) if anything exists it would be 
unknowable; (3) if anything existed and 
were knowable, the knowledge of it could 
not be communicated. 

405. The notions of these most ancient 
sceptics, both of whom died centuries be- 
fore the coming of Christ, sound familiar 
to the ears of the living thinkers, by reason 
of their so frequent repetition, in one shape 
or another, by the various schools of 
modern unbelief. 

406. Since the time of Pyrrho, this view 
of the absolute unknowability of all things, 
and this attitude of utter indifference to- 
wards the problems of being and of ex- 
perience have been called Pyrrhonism. 
With more or less of variation, the ideas of 
Pyrrho and of Corgias have survived 
through the succeeding, ages and con- 
stituted, fundamentally, the stock in trade 
of absolute scepticism. 

407. Modern Agnostics are, to some ex- 
tend at least, Pyrrhonists, and disciples, 
also, of Grorgias. The two more ancient 
sceptics, however, who have been named, 
placed their negation upon bases less 
irrational than those accepted by their 



270 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

present day disciples. Grorgias and Pyrrho 
both disavowed all actual knowledge on the 
ground either of the non-existence of reason 
and experience , or of the utter inability of 
human reason, in any way, to attain the 
truth. Latter day Agnostics, on the other 
hand, claim that they are accepting ex- 
perience only, and avoiding fields where 
reason alone may be looked to for guid- 
ance. 

408. As a matter of fact, they are by 
no means so loyal to mere experience as 
they pretend to be, or so oblivious of 
reason even when the latter passes beyond 
the sphere where its operations may rest 
upon, or are to be verified by actual sensual 
observation. The experience of which they 
make so much is that which fits in with 
their own conceptions and does not militate 
against their theories. 

409. That there can be no effect without 
a proportionate or adequate cause is one of 
the best established of all human experi- 
ences. The same is to be said with regard 
to the propositions that every complex work 
bespeaks a prior constructive plan, and in- 
dicates, likewise, some corresponding ul- 



MAN OR BUTTERFLY? 271 

terior end or purpose. And yet these three 
universal experiences of mankind Agnos- 
ticism sacrifices without scruple, when it 
comes to applying them to the solution of 
the great problems of creation and being. 

410. We have all of us ample experience 
with regard to the operations of our own 
minds, and to the potent exterior effects of 
those operations as creative agencies. 
Human intelligence has filled the earth with 
what may be called its magnificent crea- 
tions: mighty edifices, great factories, rail- 
roads, telegraphs, ocean steamers, etc. We 
know full well, so far as ourselves are con- 
cerned by our own consciousness, and as to 
others by a practically unvarying experi- 
ence, that all of these creations of the 
human intelligence have been preceeded by 
thought and plan, and that they were not so 
many idle operations, intended merely for 
the wasting or passing of time. 

411. This self same universal experience 
of men, with regard to the origin, progress 
and purpose of all human inventions and 
works, fully justifies the reasoning and con- 
clusions, as to Grod and His works, followed 
and arrived at by the vast majority of civil- 



272 THF LIGHT OF EAITH. 

ized men of every generation since the rise 
and establishment of Christianity: nothing 
which comes from intelligent man is with- 
out prior thought and plan, and without 
ulterior design or purpose; therefore, 
equally, may we know that the works, far 
grander and more useful, of the entire Uni- 
verse have also been preceeded by a great 
constructive design or plan, and have been 
conceived and executed for some definite 
and sublime end and purpose. 

412. In attempting to rule out this 
evidence for God, and for a Divine Pro- 
vidence, based upon an universal human ex- 
perience, Agnostics attempt their appeal to 
reason: that is they find themselves forced 
to seek in metaphysics, which some of them 
pretend to so despise, the semblance of an 
excuse for not abiding by the adverse judg- 
ment which human experience itself pro- 
nounces against them. 

413. It is impossible, they pretend, for 
us to know the ultimate nature of things: 
the idea of Grod, existing from all eternity 
is unthinkable. 

41 4. In attempting to reason thus, they 
are like the chess player who sweeps the 



MAN OR BUTTERFLY ? 273 

pieces from the board, when the game is 
against him. Because solutions cannot be 
forced which suit themselves, they seek to 
cast the entire matter into confusion. 

415. There are at the least two separate 
and distinct problems which they attempt 
to entangle in this way, expecting thus to 
extend to both the difficulties, if any, which 
can belong to one, only. 

416. Whether or not there exists a Being, 
infinitely superior to man in intelligence 
and power, Who has contrived and made 
the Universe ; the evidences of Whose plan 
and of Whose presence the farthest orb and 
the nearest planet alike disclose, is one 
question. Whether or not that Being has 
existed since all eternity unchanged and 
unchangeable is entirely another issue. 

417. Even if it be granted that human 
experience casts no light upon the second 
of these great questions, can this afford a 
reason for holding that it can assist in no 
way towards a solution of the first? Shall 
we silence the voice of the great law of 
causation, when it speaks in behalf of crea- 
tion with a Creator, and against mere chance 
as the cause of anything, because, forsooth, 

18 



274 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

it may to some extent be silent as to the 
ultimate nature and the eternal history of 
that same Creator? 

418. Our Agnostic friends, while they 
are denying so much, do not go as far in 
this line, as the consistencies of their own 
position might demand. If we cannot know 
that there is a Grod, because everything con- 
cerning the Divine Spirit does not fall with- 
in the limit of our finite comprehensions ; 
if we cannot know that man has a soul, be- 
cause we cannot see or feel, or weigh or 
test it, how shall we be certain that there is 
any being at all, or that the existence we 
seem conscious of is the existence we are 
truly passing through? 

419. Numerous instances, where in- 
dividuals have been subject to illusions, are 
advanced as arguments against belief in 
miracles, against inspiration, etc. We are 
told of cases where men have been firmly 
convinced that they were seeing, feeling or 
hearing things which had existence only in 
their own imaginations. As though the 
presence of any mere counterfeit was ever 
an argument sufficient against the existence, 
also, of the real? 



MAN Oil BUTTERFLY? 275 

420. But if for some there may be illu- 
sions, presenting the unreal with all the 
semblance of the real, why not for every- 
body? If, as to so many things, human 
sense and human consciousness may be so 
thoroughly deceived, why not as to all? In 
other words, have we proofs, solely phys- 
ical and experimental, which should con- 
vince the consistent Agnostic, who wishes 
to keep entirely out of the domain of doubt, 
that there is any living whatsoever; that 
there is any person or thing actually such, 
or that, if there be matter and mind and 
life, these are in fact precisely what they 
seem to be? 

421. A Chinese philosopher, who lived 
and wrote more than twenty centuries ago, 
because of the particular expressions we are 
about to quote, was styled "Butterfly Chu- 
ang." "Once upon a time," he declared, 
"I Chuang Tzu dreamed I was a butterfly, 
fluttering hither and thither, to all intents 
and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious 
only of following my fancy as a butterfly, 
and was unconscious of my individuality as 
a man. Suddenly I awaked, and there I 
lay myself again. Now I do not know 



276 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

whether I am a man who dreamt he was a 
butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, 
dreaming I am a man." 



NINTH LECTURE. 

SPENCER AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 

422. Herbert Spencer, in the preface to 
one of his latest works, "Facts and Com- 
ments/' endeavors to detail in few words 
his reasons for abandoning Christianity. He 
first declares that his study of primitive be- 
liefs leads to the conviction that there is no 
origin for the idea of an after-life, other 
than the conclusions which savages have 
drawn from the notions suggested by 
dreams. This statement is a begging of 
the entire question, in the old and much 
contested controversy, as to whether man 
was created originally with a strong prim- 
itive intellect^ the savage being a degener- 
ate, or whether the first men were merely 
improved brutes, whose progeny have since 
been making more or less progress towards 

(277) 



278 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

civilization and enlightenment. It is beg- 
ging the question also, as to whether or not 
there has been an original Divine Revela- 
tion, preserved with more or less fidelity, 
throughout the world, leaving to all men, 
with few if any true exceptions, the idea of 
a future life and of the existence of a power 
or powers, unseen but higher than human. 
For a professed agnostic, Mr. Spencer 
seems to have no trouble in taking these so 
deep and serious questions entirely out of 
the category of "things unknown." 

423. The second reason he assigns is the 
mysterious connection between brain and 
consciousness, and the fact, as he sees it, 
that we have no evidence of the existence 
of the latter, without the activity of the 
first. This connection between brain and 
thought, animists do not deny. Indeed, 
there seems to be, likewise, an essential 
relation between thought and the blood, 
hence between it and the lungs and the 
heart, which purify and propel the blood. 
But these phenomena are in no wise hostile 
to belief in the soul and its immortality. 
Christians have always held that soul and 
body, though distinct in nature, are in this 



SPENCER AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 279 

life bound intimately together; that the 
body, with its organs, is a bond between spirit 
and matter, the instrument by which an in- 
terior and invisible soul places itself in con- 
tact with an exterior and visible world. 

424. Concede that the brain is the point 
at which the soul places itself in connection 
with the entire nervous and muscular sys- 
tems, and which it first affects, when exer- 
cising acts of will, memory and understand- 
ing. Is not the brain the great center of 
the nervous system, the point to which 
converge the sensation waves which bring, 
as it were, information from the exterior, 
and whence start responsive currents, oper- 
ating the limbs and members? And when 
information is thus passed from senses to 
spirit, and when the spirit exercises its 
functions, should it astonish us to find, in 
either case, certain physical manifestations 
in the brain? The electric current from 
battery or dynamo, operating the telegraph 
or the telephone, must first strike at some 
particular point, the wires, etc., forming 
the circuit. The fact that physical effects 
are observable in the brain, during thought, 
in no manner indicates the identity of 



280 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

thought and brain action. Fire under the 
pot makes the water boil and evaporate; 
but is the fire, for this reason, or the ad- 
ditional heat communicated, one and the 
same thing with the water, which is dis- 
turbed? When the will decrees the crook- 
ing of a finger, there is in the member 
affected something of the same phenomena, 
which are to be observed in the brain, when 
thinking is being done; an access of blood 
and a disturbance and waste of tissue. But 
does this mean that the act of will, man- 
ifesting itself initially in the great nerve 
centre, the brain, is one with the muscles 
which operate to bend the fingers? 

425. But, waiving these considerations, 
let us inquire whether the conclusion that 
Christianity is to be abandoned, results 
fairly from the premises Mr. Spencer him- 
self lays down. He inherited from long 
lines of Christian ancestors belief in Grod, 
in the soul and in its immortality, His 
later condemnation of these dogmas is 
simply in the nature of the Scotch verdict 
"not proved. " Indeed, considering the 
vast multitude of good and learned men 
who differ with him in these matters, his 



SPENCER AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 281 

mental state in this regard is that rather of 
some dissenting juryman, who finds a fact, 
not proven to his individual satisfaction, 
though it be accepted as true by his col- 
leagues. 

426. Even if it be admitted that the tele- 
scope, the microscope and the spectroscope 
fail to show us God, and that the scalpel 
uncovers no evidences of a soul, why yet 
should he have surrendered, in default of 
all positive proofs against it, a creed which 
formed part of his heritage, and one which 
is accepted by the vast majority at least of 
civilized humanity, including a multitude 
of our strongest thinkers? 1 

427. Belief is an act of the will and not 

1 This thought is entitled to great weight. No 
man, save a believer in revelation, has any rational 
solution to offer to the riddle of the universe. There 
are but two ways of meeting the great questions in- 
volved. We must either concede the existence and 
providence of God and the verity of revelation, or else 
pronounce the agnostic confession of absolute defeat. 
Criticize as some may our Christian explanations, even 
the critics themselves must admit that it is either our 
solution of the deeper problems of being, or none at 
all. Under such conditions, revelation has a strong 
natural presumption to support it ; and it is entitled, in 
default of a rival, to demand that doubts be resolved in 
its favor. 



282 THE LIGHT OF FAITH. 

of the understanding. The judgment may 
sometimes influence the will, in this regard, 
but it does not and should not always con- 
trol it. Very many things are true which 
the understanding cannot fathom; and 
were faith, in practice, the bond slave of 
comprehension, we would believe very little. 
Indeed, passion and sentiment are usually 
more potent to control the will, in the mat- 
ter of belief, than is the understanding. 
Many men believe what is agreeable to 
them, no matter what their own judgments 
may declare. We cannot say that this is, 
in every case, wrong; for human reason is 
not an infallible guide, especially in matters 
of graver importance. 

428. Even Mr. Spencer lays no claim to 
positive certainty in behalf of his own con- 
clusions. He admits that upon the deeper 
questions he has reasoned himself into a 
blind alley. There was no warrant for his 
halting, dazed and helpless, in this no- 
thoroughfare of his own making, rather 
than follow the pathways which had been 
beaten by millions of confiding Christians, 
who had little difficulty in finding their way 
out of doubt and gloom and into light and 



SPENCER AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 283 

certainty. Still less reason is there why 
Mr. Spencer should have employed a life- 
time in luring others into the same maze 
wherein he himself was landed, and in striv- 
ing to persuade them that there are no 
pathways leading out of such distressful 
confusion. 



Finale. 

Dear Reader, if you be blessed with the 
gift of true faith, you must be aware that 
the dominion of Glod over all mankind and 
His control over all human affairs justify 
and necessitate the use of prayer. Let 
your humility, therefore, suggest to you the 
need of frequent and earnest supplications 
for the steadfastness of your own belief; 
and let your charity impel you also to pray 
often and fervently that the light may be 
extended to others, now sitting in spiritual 
darkness. If the great Christian world would 
only perform its full duty, in this regard, 
towards the pagan and the unbeliever, 
the Church of Christ, we must consider, 
would speedily extend in all directions, and 
would gather into its bosom a vast multi- 
tude of souls, now unfortunately alien to it. 

(284) 



FINALE. 285 

If, dear Reader, you be one of those 
who, believing in Grod and His Providence, 
are yet unable to convince themselves of the 
truth of Christian revelation, of the divinity 
and sacred mission of Christ, at least close 
not your heart and soul against the inspira- 
tion and grace of Grod. Turn often, on the 
contrary, with humility and confidence to 
the Supreme Master of the Universe for 
light and guidance ; to Him Who holds you 
and the entire human race in the palm of 
His hand. "Ask and it shall be given unto 
you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it 
shall be opened unto you." Do this per- 
severingly, and with a persistent hope, and 
even be it possible, under such conditions, 
that a solution for your doubts shall not 
sooner or later come, at the least you may 
feel that you have striven to do your duty 
in this most solemn and important regard, 
and that you have not faced the great 
mysteries of life, death and eternity, with 
criminal indifference and a most stupen- 
dous folly. 

FINIS. 



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